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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22988110">i was a younger man then (now) (post hoc)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fingersfallingupwards/pseuds/fingersfallingupwards'>fingersfallingupwards</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>(just like) starting over [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Beatles (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - The Time Traveler's Wife Fusion, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Canonical Character Death, Denial, Drugs, Fluff, Gun Violence, Hope, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Smut, Time Travel, glasses john!, john is deviant, paradoxes everywhere</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 07:01:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>27,730</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22988110</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fingersfallingupwards/pseuds/fingersfallingupwards</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>John’s twelve when a bloke appears from a flaming pie and says, “From this day forward you are Beatles with an ‘a.’” The bloke is Paul.</p><p>Or: paul and john meet at all ages and eras and john is the time-traveler’s wife the way only john lennon can be</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>John Lennon/Paul McCartney</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>(just like) starting over [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667890</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>83</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>119</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>You can read a mini primer of the time-traveler's wife trope <a href="https://fingersfallingupwards.dreamwidth.org/715.html">HERE</a></p><p>Chapter title from James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>John digs fingers into the wet earth behind his house. A sack of stolen odds and ends sits beside him, pinched from Mimi’s figurine collection and squirreled away from nasty, no-good Colin Small’s bookbag after he called John a waste whose own Da doesn’t like him. It’s fine, at twelve, John’s grown out of playing with dirt and bugs and into the way fire eats up the line of anything. The lighter in his pocket is courtesy of Jim Blair’s older brother and he’s excited to see how his haul of items fares against the heat.</p><p>Being a boy scout has taught him handy tricks about burning others’ things responsibly; hence how he claws out clumps of earth to make a fire pit, though it looks more of a pie crust. He pours in the filling, smiling at the jangle of paper notes and plastic before lowering his lite to the mess of it.</p><p>It’s smoldering wonderfully, baking into a fine pie of ruin when a pair of shoes land right in the middle.</p><p>“Christ! What— what’s all this then?”</p><p>John’s wide eyes dart up and find a bloke standing in his flaming pie. The man’s older than John but younger than Mimi and George. His hair flaps as he stamps a mad shuffle out of the fire and onto the grass, looking all kinds of cross even though he’s the one what’s ruined it by popping from nowhere.</p><p>“Where’d you come from?”</p><p>The bloke doesn’t answer, though John admits, he swears wonderfully as he scrapes shoes and pats out a smoking patch from his dark pant leg. “Fucking Christ, I’m a bleeding beetle, I shouldn’t have to put up with this muck!”</p><p>“Who’s a beetle?” John asks, thinking that men who wear nice suits like this don’t usually say the kind of nonsense John himself does.</p><p>“I am, or will be.” The bloke gauges the mess of his boots before calling it a loss. He looks up to see John squeezing his dirty hands like pincers and laughs. “No, Beatles with an ‘a’.” His eyes flicker over John, taking in the young bend of his scraped knees and the lighter in his hand. “<em>We </em>will be,” he corrects, a wide grin stretching over either end of his smooth face like something from the magazines. “I’ll be putting up with your muck then, too.”</p><p>“What? How’s that? And where did you come from?” John asks again earning a wink. When he leans back to call for George to come and have a see, the bloke vanishes, leaving John alone with his smoking crime-scene just as his uncle arrives.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>John’s fourteen and leaving school when he spies the bloke again, standing across the street wearing a train-wreck of knitted colors calling itself a vest. He pops against the brick and mortar grey of Liverpool and John goggles behind his glasses. He always thought he imagined the bloke, but the bloke is staring at John too, familiar like he remembers stepping in a flaming trash-pie. His little fingers twitter in a wave and John half-raises his own hand, sure his mouth is hanging open.</p><p> A bus passes between them and the bloke’s disappeared again.</p><p>John’s neck cranks as he looks left, right and anywhere to see if someone noticed the blotting out of some eerie bright thing in the street, but heads are craned down towards children and newspapers, and John catches his breath, feeling daft and light limbed. His lips tighten and he keeps his nose clean the whole way home. Last time he wrote up the incident, but Mimi, reading it over his shoulder, said the language was creative. John was literal back then, and he’s even more literal now when he murmurs to himself, “I’ve seen a ghost.”</p><p>John’s never been the most <em>all right </em>of any lads, but there’s being odd, being <em>odd, </em>and being the bloke what sees people appear and vanish. It keeps happening too. John spies a haunting presence scraping against his periphery, sitting on benches or leaning over the book stacks. It’s always dark-haired with big lazy eyes that John can draw even with only having seen them for seconds all put together. He doodles the slant of them among the wandering curling figures congregating in margins in his notebooks and carries on. If he is a mad lad, there’s a certain way to do it in John’s opinion. Though sometimes he’d really like a scream.</p><p>In this way, John accepts he’s the other end of daft; it doesn’t stop him from forming a skiffle group and aiming to be as big as Elvis. In fact, his daftness is a credit, letting him gun down lyrics with only half the words and vocal decoupage.</p><p>The Quarrymen trample and giggle the earth behind the church, drunk more on the thrilling memory of a <em>crowd </em>than the beer shared between them<em>.</em> John barely turns when Ivan appears, some lad trailing behind.</p><p>“Got someone for you to meet,” Ivan says, and the short bloke in a white sports coat steps up.</p><p>“I’m Paul,” a voice lilts. “You’re…”</p><p>“I am that,” John says squinting at the blurred face, shapeless as the rest of the world without his goggles. “And who are you when you’re at home?”</p><p>There’s a pause, something uncertain in the air before Paul says, “I play guitar.” He seems muted.</p><p>“Aye, like me then?” John bares his teeth. “We’ve a guitarist already.”</p><p>“Sing too, with more of the words,” Paul corrects and there’s a tense beat before John lets his smile drift into something dismissive.</p><p>“Congratulations,” he says. “You must do your group proud.”</p><p>Ivan scratches his head and Paul shuffles vague in his sight. Fucking typical. “I brought him to see about joining yours. Give us a song, Paul.”</p><p>Even with his nasty vision, John can tell when someone’s holding the guitar wrong way round and says as such.</p><p>“Not for a left-hander,” Paul corrects. He takes his time, tuning John’s over-strung guitar with a focus that renders him blind to the other’s chuckles and John’s grudging admiration. He does it right faster than John could. Then, smooth as Elvis, Paul drops into <em>Twenty-Flight Rock</em> and the words are right too, and not the way that John makes them right. John tells him he’ll think about it, but before the end of the day, he’s decided to make Ivan invite him sometime next week. Better to let everyone stew. Later, John laughs as Paul makes <em>him</em> stew for four days before agreeing to join the band.</p><p>Paul turns out to be the right kind of addition. He’s serious about music in a way no one in John’s life has been except maybe his Mam, Julia. That she’s a busy housewife says something of the musical desert John lives in. Paul’s canny with chords and tuning and he promises to teach John what he knows when John presses the matter.</p><p>Paul comes to Menlove, looking very clean and greeting Mimi with the full force of his charm. “Paul McCartney, how do ye do?”</p><p>John doesn’t need his glasses to see Mimi’s thin lips flattening and the cool assessment of her face, having witnessed it enough to stamp over his memory. Paul’s face he wishes he could see because the way he stumbles through the rest of the introduction belies his utter shock at being evenly snubbed. His dark vague features are still twisted as they head up the stairs.</p><p>“Don’t take it personally, she’s a treat to everyone.” John perches on his bedcovers, nestling his guitar over one thigh. Paul seems even more put-out by this, and John looks forward to seeing him struggle to get on her non-existent good side. They settle across from each other, and John likes the way they echo the other like a mirror because of Paul’s wrong-handedness.</p><p>They work for a few minutes before John’s stumbling causes him to curse. “Jesus, just wait.” He takes out his glasses and slides them up his nose. He’s aware of the defensive twist of his lips, half a mean jab sits in his mouth. It falls back into the abyss of his throat as he sees Paul for the first time with clarity.</p><p>He knew Paul had big dark eyes, but he didn’t realize the way they cut such long lines in the corners of his face or how the color straddles an in-between place of brown and green. It’s softer, but without question he’s the unbaked version of the daft bloke passing through John’s life.</p><p>Paul smiles, and it’s the same as then too, all peaks, crescents, and even teeth. “There you are,” he says, and adds, impossibly, “I never seen you without your glasses before. Thought I had the wrong bloke.”</p><p>John drops his guitar and really screams.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Accidental time-travel is what Paul trots out when John pushes him, now sitting in the garden after Mimi chased them outside. “You’ve seen me before then?” Paul asks. Those familiar eyes shimmer and John almost wants to rip his lenses off and retreat into the vague shapelessness of ten minutes ago.</p><p>“Not this you,” John admits, rubbing his head.</p><p>“How was I?” Paul straightens into a forward lean. John only shakes his head, wordless. “You never tell me in the future either,” Paul complains.</p><p>“You’ve seen me, then?” John asks, curious.</p><p>“Not saying a word, am I? One turn deserves another.” Paul brings his leg into the garden chair with him, eyes still staring at John with something like nostalgia despite being two years younger. It unnerves John, the whole business, and his eyes flicker over to the house, anticipating some unseen punchline.</p><p>Wary, he still wonders, “Still, time-travel. How’s that?”</p><p>“Me mother gave it me. Her mother her, and the father before that.” Paul waves a hand. “Goes to the first-born, you see. Been doing it as long as I can remember, and I’ll keep on ‘til I die.”</p><p>“And how’s it that you keeping popping in on me?” John wonders. “We hadn’t even met. I mean, in our time. This time.” A ruddy flush spills over the wide of Paul’s cheeks, and John swears. “Jesus, is it only me, then?” Discontent creeps under his skin and it feels heavy, too much for a lad he’s just met properly to own the eyes haunting him for years.</p><p>“I guess we’re to be mates. You’re supposed to follow someone important in your life.”</p><p>“Who’d your mam follow?”</p><p>“…Me father.”</p><p>John’s too mature to kick someone out so he blows out of the garden cursing the day he ever burned Mimi’s bric-a-brac. He avoids Paul for a week, skiving off and missing hang-outs and band practice with the lads. Can’t well show up with crazy little Paulie hanging around, being <em>odd</em>.  It’s easier said than done avoiding someone who can pop into your timeline, and John spends a reluctant afternoon in a graveyard with another Paul.</p><p>This one is in his thirties, easily, and when he sees John, he doesn’t kick a fuss or follow him with his eyes. Instead, he taps a cigarette out from his clean suit and lays out on one of the long gravestones, like he’s done it all his life.</p><p>“Have one for me?” John asks after a long effort of ignoring the bloke. The man lights it with his own and extends it to John, barely lifting his head. White and black leather shoes poke from the man’s feet, and John muses that Paul’s made something of himself, and matured too, from the way he seems content to pass the visit in silence.</p><p>Somehow, it’s just the thing to get John’s mouth running. “I’m not a bloody queer, and I sure as hell didn’t sign up to be someone else’s, time-traveler or no.”</p><p>Paul hums, a mere spiral of smoke denoting his continued presence.</p><p>It’s permission for John to unload the worst of his thoughts and anxieties painted as hate and disgust. The man takes it in with his cigarette, moving onto a second with the barest pause, letting John expel the most violent of his miseries, before saying, “It isn’t like I chose either.”</p><p>John blinks hard, shocked at how it smarts. They don’t know each other, or at least John doesn’t, but he’d made an assumption, taken for granted the intent interest of those eyes. John hasn’t said anything, but Paul lifts his head, hair clipping his shoulders as he rubs his face. “Not like that. I mean… I mean that choosing isn’t what matters. There are people in your life who are just important. You don’t pick your parents, do ye? And for this time-tripping, well, you’re it for me.” There’s nothing canting about his hips, or the way his eyes glance over and John finds himself relaxing.</p><p>“We’re mates?” Relief slips through his breaking voice.</p><p>“Labels, John,” Paul scoffs. “You’ve always hated them.”</p><p>Paul, so much older, would know, wouldn’t he? A little thrill shoots through John’s spine. He finds himself squatting beside the other, looking at the man with crow’s feet like a promise. Paul looks back, long-suffering. His eyes chase over the sky before he reaches to his pocket and lights another cigarette.</p><p>John smokes it with unfolding glee. So, this is the pleasure in knowing, he thinks, and being known.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He swings to Allerton and knocks up the McCartney door. Paul appears in the gap, pale-faced as he steps out with him.</p><p>“I’m not daft, you are!” John crows and Paul blanches further, skin taking on a deathly tinge. John lowers his voice. “I mean, I thought I was going soft, you know? This time-travel stuff, it’s a lucky turn for me.”</p><p>Paul watches him a moment more, looking inscrutable and distant and John thinks about what the older Paul said about it being neither of their choices. Then, Paul’s expression eases. “You are soft, Johnny. Can’t blame your mad thoughts on me. You’ve a twisted nature.”</p><p>“Have the facts, do you?” John asks, leaning forward and earning flickers of emotions playing over Paul’s eyes. Knowing, John thinks, shivers… <em>wants</em>.</p><p>“Even if I hadn’t,” Paul says, and John laughs.</p><p>“Show us G again?” John waggles his guitar.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>John tries to balance the way Paul feels like the set-up to his biggest failure and also the only sure thing in his life. He does his uneven best with mixed but swelling results.</p><p>Paul keeps appearing, in all manner of dress and John starts thinking about the <em>future </em>as some concrete place he lives in, one with embroidered satin jackets and long wide pants. He asks all of them what year they’re from, but they laugh and ignore him in turn. It’s interesting to think about how they can be cast so far in the future and still be on the ins and outs with each other. John tries to pry details from his Paul about what he’s seen, but he shakes his head, eyes shining.</p><p>The future is neat, but the past is less. Once, John opens the pantry and finds a toddler sitting on the ground, reaching for the tins of beans to rap on. Big eyes goggle ‘neath thick dark hair and John shuts the door. He smokes a cigarette and after when he returns, he’s glad to see the pantry has decided to empty itself of any children. He makes himself toast with hands that only just tremble.</p><p>Christ, if Paul shows up as a baby, John’s not sure what he’d do besides send him down the Mersey river in a bleedin’ basket.</p><p>“Your mam doesn’t know the way to stop it, does she?” he asks. They’re clipping along Blackpool, having taken in a movie and now prowling about for birds. “Just because my life is awkward and a bloke could do with some privacy…”</p><p>Paul’s face does this shuttering dance, lips twisting beyond what John can parse. “She’s not likely to say, being dead.”</p><p>His knowledge about Paul rearranges itself, and he has to look out to the sea for a second. “D’ye ever see her traveling? Since she’s along with your Da?” His voice is soft and unfamiliar to himself. John always has to duck under the eyes of old Jim McCartney, feeling too self-conscious and fearing a kindred look. Now he has another reason to avoid those eyes. How must it be to have a dead wife pop in on you? John really wouldn’t like to know.</p><p>Paul shrugs, peeling John out of his thoughts. “Not yet. I guess the good thing about it is I never really know for sure, do I? Might do.”</p><p>John smiles and Paul returns it, gentler. “How does it work, the tripping, I mean?” John’s taken on the older Paul’s phrase for the swing in it, and the Paul of now follows. A paradox, John muses, something about bootstraps he’d read before in a space-fiction anthology.</p><p>“I don’t know, not like I can ask anyone now…” Paul makes a face, shaking off the vague self-pity. His stride picks up. “For me, I think it’s about concentration. If I’m focused on something, I’m not liable to wander off, but if me head drifts…” He snaps his fingers.</p><p>“Christ, if it were me, I’d be gone every day!” John goggles. How much concentration must it take not to lose concentration? “How do you sleep?”</p><p>Paul laughs. “Sleep takes a lot of focus, you gotten relax your mind, think of something pleasant.”</p><p>“Someones, more like.” John elbows him and Paul laughs.</p><p>“Your words. Sleep is easy, it’s the rest of the time that’s harder. S’why music is so good. If I’m thinking about it, I’m concentrating.”</p><p>That certainly explains the way it plays on Paul’s mind like unending vinyl. Still, John bumps his hip into Paul’s. “Show us, then?”</p><p>“What, now?” Paul’s face twists.</p><p>“Yes now! How do I know this isn’t an elaborate plot set up with your freaky extended family?” John hazards wildly. “Anything’s possible with make-up these days, have you seen the birds? Can’t tell the real from the fake.”</p><p>Paul rolls his eyes, seeing the excuse for exactly what it is. “No, I’m not traveling for you.”</p><p>“Thought you liked performing under pressure,” John purrs, enjoying Paul’s prickle. “Come on!”</p><p>“But…”</p><p>“But what?”</p><p>“But we’re at Blackpool already,” Paul says like it’s an answer. John swallows his next words and grows aware of the pale sky looming above, the rattling lap of waves and the hint of heat at his elbow where Paul hovers to and fro. If John were the time-traveler, he’d skive off into his own timeline as often as possible. There’d hardly be any of it to visit, that’s how often he’d like to disconnect from this nonsensical, rotten mistake of a world. But Paul… Paul looks at a day with John at Blackpool and sees it better, sees it worthy. Unexpected affection looms over John like a wave and he only has a moment to marvel before it sweeps through him like a flood.</p><p>He takes Paul by the shoulders, steering him away from noticing the soppy expression drenching John’s face. “We better make the most of it, while you’re here. Who knows when next you’ll—” He snaps.</p><p>“Well, I’ll try to stay focused, but dull company…” Paul shakes his head.</p><p>John’s teeth flash. “If I hold on, d’you think I’d come along?”</p><p>“More like get dropped in a void,” Paul threatens, but he’s smiling too.</p><p>Labels, John muses, looking at the curl of Paul’s hair against his cheek.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Paul turns out to be the best choice he doesn’t make. They get older together and start writing their own music. Lots of it is shite but being able to turn to someone and share a song and have it treated seriously is a thrill John hasn’t adjusted to. The time-travel becomes a consistent background companion. While never the focus of their friendship, it does add flavor to it, an excitement that, along with the music, keeps him running back to Paul when others phase-out of John’s life. Despite his protests never to show, Paul’s disappeared once or twice when John blinks and appears minutes later, looking distracted and dizzy. He once reappears on John’s bed completely soaked through, face flush and dazed.</p><p>“Christ, catch the rain, then?” John fumbles for a towel.</p><p>Paul shivers, smile uncurling. “No, the <em>Bahamas.”</em></p><p>“The Bahamas!” John crows, throwing the linen at Paul’s face. “The bleeding Bahamas?!”</p><p>If Paul tripped there, then John must <em>be </em>in the Bahamas. He looks down at his guitar, feeling it a brighter thing. Paul’s never said one way or the other about whether they make it big, saying he usually lands in odd places anyways, that it’s hard to tell… But the Bahamas are something, aren’t they?</p><p>“You best be careful. With all my future travels you’re likely to drop outside of an airplane.” John grins.</p><p>Paul rubs the towel over his hair, peeking out from underneath it. “Shouldn’t happen. I should only go places which are safe. There’s some self-preservation in this madness or so me mam said.”</p><p>“S’at why you don’t appear by other people,” John asks.</p><p>“Crowd's are all right, but few people are safe as houses, John,” Paul mutters, and John feels an unearned thrill that drops hot as Paul tries to air out the shirt clinging stubborn to his pale chest. John isn’t trying to stare, but the wet skin and curling hair prove distracting. A flush works over Paul’s face when they meet eyes and John tunes his guitar.</p><p>“Do you ever go back, then?” John asks, to distract himself. “Seems like you’re always tripping forward.”</p><p>Paul shrugs, scratching his warm cheek. “Not much to trip back for is there? You’re only what, seventeen? There’s way more future than past at this point.”</p><p>John wonders how far Paul’s gone, how <em>long </em>John lives, but he can’t quite force the words from his mouth. They feel callous somehow and frighteningly finite. For now, he trusts that he at least makes it to the Bahamas, however many years that takes… Between thinking of the Bahamas or his death and whether Paul’s seen it, John picks the Bahamas every time.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>When he hears the news, John spends thirty seconds numb to the world. Bicycle bells clamor in his ear over a rising swell of crashing water. Thirty seconds pass before he cranks his head towards Paul. “Did you know? Did you know about this?!”</p><p>Paul’s face glows glossy and wan in light of the news, his breath a shaking rattle. “No, Johnny. I… No.” John believes him. Someone, Pete, undoes the hands gripping Paul by the cuff and John realizes at length they’re his own.</p><p>Paul staggers back, slumps into the wall and stares at John. Horrible comprehension lurks there, <em>understanding,</em> and the knowing is too much for John who wrenches away to scream and kick at the shelves near him. They break and tumble at his touch, spilling books over the floor and John hopes to never read another word again.</p><p>It should get easier with practice, the losing. Instead, Mimi’s cold tears and pursed lips ache all the more a second time around. Watching the coffin lay down not far from Uncle George’s is terrifying, so John doesn’t think about it; he waits and scans the attendees’ faces, looking for someone only just familiar.</p><p>He’s smoking a cigarette in Strawberry Fields when it comes. There’s the thud-drop of someone meeting the ground and then John is <em>on him</em>, tacking him onto the grass and writhing and beating against his chest.</p><p>“How could you! How could you, you ruddy bastard!”</p><p>“John, John!” Hands work around his arms, pulling them back. “Calm down, love!”</p><p>John blinks through the deluge of tears painting his face to see Paul, hair a pale brown and face carved with age-lines. Forty if more, and he shouldn’t be able to hold John off the way he is, but John finds himself weak and ineffectual, struggling in the grasp but staying there still.</p><p>Paul scans his face, dark eyes roving the planes and tearstains, soaking up his black shirt and he sighs. “Oh, is this about your mam?”</p><p>Ire thunders through his mouth.</p><p>“Yes, it’s me mam!” John shouts. “Of course it is! What else would it be!” How could he talk about her with surprise? Think of her as some event long past? How could it ever be <em>possible</em><em>?</em> “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have stopped it!”</p><p>“You’d just have likely gotten yourself killed trying.” He holds up a hand to John’s frothing protest. “Stopping death is not why I’m here John, it isn’t why I travel.” His eyes are mired and John shivers, suddenly aware that he’s standing before something other.</p><p>“Are you even human?” John spits. “Do you even think of your own dead mam, Paul?!”</p><p>He’s expecting a good licking or at least a kick. Instead, Paul eyes him with empathy so aged it seems sympathetic. John tries to knee him, but Paul sits them up. “All the time, John.”</p><p>That answer is somehow more shocking. “What? Even now? Even old as dirt?” John gasps, he’s breathing too hard.</p><p>“Even older,” Paul murmurs.</p><p>“It doesn’t get better then? It never stops?!”</p><p>“It changes.” Paul even dares to sound reasonable about it.</p><p>“I don’t want to live with this.” John cries. He shakes Paul. “You should have let me try.”</p><p>“You’re too precious to waste here in Liverpool.” His old eyes are too much and John looks away. Paul sighs. “You don’t want to talk to me, John.” He tilts his head, and John follows the motion in time to see a figure in blue dart behind the brick gate and out of sight.</p><p>He looks down and finds only grass. His feet stumble over each other as he lurches up and clambers his way around the corner to find his Paul. </p><p>It’s no one’s fault, but he smacks his Paul in the nose anyway and feels cartilage give.</p><p>“Fuck off, John!” Paul screams, blood dripping into his teeth. “Fuck right off!” John isn’t going anywhere, has a grip now and won’t let go; Paul’s got one too.</p><p>“How do you do it, sitting there with your Mam dead, going to school, putting the kettle on? How do you do it?!” It’s half accusatory half revelation-seeking, and Paul spits the blood from his cheek.</p><p>“I don’t know, do I? When I heard… when I heard the first thing I asked was about the money.” His eyes are wild and John’s heart kicks in his chest. “I don’t know how I go on, just that I do.”</p><p>Everything in John slackens and the tears are coming harder, fueled only by misery.</p><p>“You’ll do it too,” Paul whispers, putting a hand over his back, rubbing the fragile tension frayed to snapping and somehow making it better. “You’ll do it too, John.”</p><p>As the time-tripper, John supposes he’d know. They take shelter beneath the gate and weep, rubbing bloodied hands over their faces in the plain public of anyone passing and when John moans and keens Paul tells him, “You’ll do it,” and it’s so much a  promise and a threat that it soothes some feral strangeness dwelling in his chest.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>John goes on, in spite of his daft mam and the daft world, John goes on. He goes to art college to get Mimi off his back, but his mind dwells on the music scarping about the corners of his mind, waiting to be pulled into intelligibility. John’s living with Stu now and the freedom to play guitar and write ditties without the looming threat of Mimi’s proper nosiness is a freeing thing.</p><p>Stu’s a good bloke, though he and Paul seem often at ends. It amuses John, because they’re both poncy, just in different directions. Unsurprisingly, Paul’s never tripped off or in while Stu’s around, supposes he isn’t safe as houses, but that raises the question about <em>who is?</em></p><p>“How many people know you trip?” John asks as Paul takes the kettle from the creaky stove. He’s wearing an old sweater that stretches against his recent height.</p><p>“Me family and you. Some girl I told when I was eight I think.” Paul doesn’t volunteer information about his condition, but he’s willing to answer John’s questions. It seems more than fair since John has his equal, unasked part in this.</p><p>“No one else’s seen you or noticed?” John asks. “I know children are always popping up from nowhere undesired, but that’s hard to imagine!” That Paul doesn’t rise to his age bait proves he has finally grown up some. He’s grown more than just some if John’s being fair. Paul leans back against the counter, bending along his increasingly leaner and longer lines. His face is still daft, soft and curved like something that might fit in John’s hand and he’s been trying not to notice as much. It’s worse knowing how much he’ll stay the same, how those lips keep their boyish bubble and his smile its toothy slant. It’s not the first time, the way John notices things about blokes. It’s easier with his glasses off, the desire becomes less defined, but with Paul he’s always seeing too much.</p><p>John Lennon is no one’s queer, not even a mad time-traveler’s… but Paul… Paul is something else, isn’t he? Clean and masculine, hair curling out on the edges of his proper cut and eyes that straddle colors. He’s music and John can’t help but have feelings about that.</p><p>They knock out half a song and then Paul fucks off to put the kettle on for his da or pet George or some toss like that.</p><p>John tries to finish the song before slapping it down and slinking on top of his sheets. Stu is out, and only the walls see him kicking his pants off. He starts, as he usually does with good old Bridget, come fuck-me lips and breasts enough to farm on. She’s smooth under his grip, little hands on his prick and he’s gasping even as the hands grow more callused in his imagination, the lips less painted and more scuffed with little hair that would rasp across his cheek—</p><p>“Oh, John.” A tittering, <em>familiar </em>laugh knocks John’s eyes open and he nearly flips off the bed as he sees Paul swaying in front of the locked door. It takes John a half-second to realize it isn’t his imagination and another half before he’s cursing to high heaven.</p><p>“Jesus fucking Churchill, Paul!” he cries. “Can you not see I’m in the middle of something??”</p><p>Paul blinks, eyes glazed and shiny. His mouth falls open a little and John finds himself distracted by the mustache crossing the upper part of his lip. His dick twitches beneath his hand, he just imagined it…</p><p>“I’m sorry Johnny, no need to stop on my account,” Paul says, arms swinging wide beneath his blue embroidered sleeves. “’Specially when you’ve such racy material as Jesus fucking Churchill.”</p><p>“Not going to continue, am I?” John growls, pulling the blanket over his hips and glaring, betrayed.</p><p>“Didn’t mean to pop in while you were popping off.” Paul chuckles and stretches his hands up. “But this? This is good stuff, the best stuff. I could run a country on it. Not surprised I lost me focus.”</p><p>“What kind of stuff?” John asks, despite himself.</p><p>A lazy smile pulls on either corner of his face. “The cocaine kind.” He’s laughing again. “Can’t remember feeling so good, we thought Bob’s stash was fine, but this, but this!” He spins a little where he stands and then flops onto the bed, heedless of John curling his legs up. Paul slumps, leaning down. “I could do anything, it’s wide open, anything!”</p><p>There’s a heaviness in Paul’s gaze, even as blitzed as he is. It’s weighted with expectation that John is not yet privy too. He suspects… no, maybe he hopes that it’s to do with Paul noticing John noticing Paul. Electricity stirs in the air and if John’s dick twitches in fear and excitement it’s only his business.</p><p>“Shouldn’t make promises like anything.” The words are out of John before he really thinks of it. He toes the line, waits and sees and is rewarded by the way Paul’s hand slinks up the blankets and curls around his ankle.</p><p>“Can too,” Paul murmurs. He watches John, smiles when John’s leg slackens and pulls straight ‘neath his grip. The other leg is next and then Paul sidles on up, digging elbows into the mattress as he takes a position John’s only seen from loose birds.</p><p>John shivers. Paul seems… practiced; so comfortable with how he taps the erection and grins at John’s groan. He shuffles the blanket down, eyeing John for signs but John knows his eyes are bleeding a FUCK YES across his face. Paul sees it, laughs and it's hot breath blowing over John’s prick and those dark teeming eyes glittering like it’s a treat.</p><p>“Are you or aren’t you?” John asks, panting. Paul winks and then those thick lips curl around the head and John throws his head back. “Christ, Paul!”</p><p>Paul hums, and it wretches a sound deep from John’s chest. It’s so intense John feels his eyes fluttering, but he can’t bring himself to look away from the dark silky head dropping up and down, the way his mustache butts against John’s pubic hair and tangles for a moment. The eyes, watching him, reaping pleasure even as Paul’s own hips squirm and shimmy over the bedspread.</p><p>Paul’s experienced, John thinks again, much better than any bird and someone had to <em>show </em>him how to do this. John fucking hopes it’s him— will make it him, because queer or whatever else hardly matters when Paul’s lips spread and a finger circles the rim of John’s ass.</p><p>He blows, and Paul sucks up thick globs, spilling a little on his chin, licking up the edges of his lips. He smiles again, showing a chipped tooth and then says, “See, wide open.”</p><p>John collapses against the bed and when he looks up again, he’s alone.</p><p>“Bloody hell,” he utters, trying to still his throbbing heart.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>John means to put it out of his head, to leave it on the sheets with the little damp spot Paul had rubbed in. He can’t. When he sees Paul at the Jacardia, his face runs hot and he can’t help but duck eyes. What are they in the future that Paul can stop in and drop for a blow job? <em>What is John that he wants that?</em> He watches Paul in his leathers, hips bobbing and twisting the backbeat and wonders if older John’s had him yet. It sends a shiver of twisted jealousy over his spine. That more than anything lets him crowd Paul’s space after the set, crushing him into an alcove in the backstage.</p><p>“John?” Paul boggles at him, something bubbling behind his eyes. “I’m not…”</p><p>“I don’t care, do I?” John replies, stepping closer and knocking his hips into Paul’s. They’re high from performing and his hardness bumps against Paul’s. John leans closer, courageous now for a future set in stone and lets his mouth whisper over Paul’s ear. “We don’t have to call it this or the other. But the way I see it, we’re missing out on something very obvious.”</p><p>He gasps when Paul ruts forward a little, but the hips still and he’s treated to the flush crawling around Paul’s face. “I don’t know what I’ve said to you,” Paul says, hands meeting John’s elbows. “But we don’t have to.”</p><p>Ho, ho, so future John has done or said a thing or two to the lad, putting ideas into his head. Wicked clever, he is, and encroaching on John’s territory too.</p><p>“All the more reason.”</p><p>Paul isn’t immune, hasn’t been immune, and as John senses his gaze on him, he feels the familiar pull of hazel eyes tracing his features, appreciating. John lets out a little sigh. “Could be good,” John says. “More than.”</p><p>His hand slips down, tracing ribs and back before stopping on hip and Paul leans forward into the touch, his erection brushing against John’s again. John grins. “Doesn’t have to be anything, does it?”</p><p>Paul’s eyes are complex, but the thought vanishes as he leans in, lips curling and left hand drifting down.</p><p> </p><p>+</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>...this may be the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written. This fic is COMPLETE and will be posted in three chapters every week around this time for a total of 20,000 words.</p><p> </p><p>Leave a comment, if you like ❤️</p><p>
  <a href="https://fingersfallingupwards.tumblr.com/">TUMBLR</a>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Everything That Rises Must Converge</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Paul keeps tripping in and out of John's timeline, but not even a time-traveler can fix everything.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Chapter title comes from the short story collection "Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor. I think John would very much like O'Connor's books (particularly "Wise Blood") and both authors enjoyed a little <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/12/flannery-oconnor-cartoons/">drawing</a> with their writings...</p><p>Please enjoy.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>+</p><p>John and Paul start something, and it’s neither more than less than it is. A quick toss off after finishing a song or lingering looks building with drink. They’re mates above all and that’s what makes it work, or so John thinks. What they have is <em>good </em>and better still, it’s part and parcel of their process and chemistry. Their music grows in spurts and jumps and they land a fair gig in Hamburg.</p><p>Paul keeps tripping in and out of John’s life though the visits are less with how often they’re surrounded by strangers. All huddled in the room, they barely have space for themselves, let alone another Paul. The loss doesn’t strike much with how busy they are though John enjoys the visits that he does have. He finally gets one from the recent past and has a laugh over pinching fifteen-year-old Paul’s doughy cheeks. There are other glimpses, Paul in an alcove during their set or peering down the other end of a lonely street at 2 AM.</p><p>The best visit by far comes during a strange episode in the wee hours. Stu’s fucked off somewhere with Astrid. George, Paul and Pete are on the prowl for something wet and John’s trying to settle the drunk, too-fast rabbiting of his heart. He puts on his glasses to see if it makes the ceiling less of a nauseous swirl with little success. His head turns as he hears the clatter of shoes hitting the floor.</p><p>John levers himself up for a look and soaks in the tall figure in a suit. Paul wears a lot of suits in the near future that John’s pieced together. This one has wide pant-legs and a vest to suit. A beard wreathes the bottom of his face, lush and thicker than anything Paul could grow now. His cheeks seem fatter with the beard, and the rest of him has a roundness, an over-fed plushness that John hasn’t seen since he met Paul. He should be older with all these differences, but John feels suddenly alien as he realizes the crow’s feet haven’t even begun to set. This Paul is young but very different from the further future John’s seen.</p><p>“Hamburg then,” Paul murmurs, hands trailing their wooden bunks. “I remember these. Nightmare trying to fit a bird in.” Paul should smile after saying such, but his gaze is distant, too-nostalgic even for a time-traveler. A weary sigh pushes out as Paul lowers himself onto John’s bed.</p><p>“On the good stuff again?” John asks, hitching a brow. The double meaning doesn’t skate by Paul, but his smile is a thin thing. He’s not like some of the older Paul’s who ignore John but can’t quite keep the distant amusement off their faces. This one is serious, and it makes John kick his legs out and twitch like a spastic.</p><p>“I’d give you some of m-m-mine, b-but I’ve taken the load-d-d,” John plays. That earns him something.</p><p>“You’re daft,” Paul murmurs. His face is softer though, and he doesn’t shudder away when John’s leg extends to rub against his hand.</p><p>“Since you’re here, how about doing us a favor?” John posits.</p><p>“Favor from you could be anything.”</p><p>John rolls his shoulders and feels better for what he’s about to say when Paul tracks the movement of muscle beneath his undershirt. “It’s only that me and Paulie, the one here and now, we’ve been looking for someone to teach us certain techniques. Not the musical sort either.” Paul’s eyes darken and John can’t help the feral smile. “You understand, don’t you?”</p><p>“You’re in the dirtiest city in the world and you can’t find someone to teach you anal?” Paul asks, brow raised.</p><p>“Haven’t the German,” John replies. “And ‘sides, I know the theory, we tried it before—”</p><p>Paul cringes. “Oh Christ, I remember now. You shoved your whole bloody hand in.”</p><p>“Blasphemy, heresy!” John denies, poking his glasses up like a university marm.</p><p>“To the wrist!” Paul crows. “I couldn’t sit right for a week!”</p><p>“Aye, so we’ve come to this,” John says, letting a bit of a purr come through. “Show us how it’s done, Paulie?”</p><p>There’s hesitation, a dipping doubt that flutters over Paul’s eyes as he runs hands over his long hair. John could wait for a different Paul, one young enough to play yet old enough to know but having seen this strange specimen, John knows one way or another he has to have him. It must show on his face because Paul’s expression clears and a sad smirk cracks his cheeks.</p><p>“Let me see if I have this; you want me to teach you anal so that you can show me now, and then I’ll show you again when I’m this age? You and your bootstraps.” Paul shakes his head, and if it’s a little bitter, John won’t say so. “Depraved, it is.”</p><p>“If you’re going to time-travel, you may as well be canny with it. Share what depravities you can.” John lets his leather-clad legs flap open and the dark want in Paul’s eyes sends skitters up his spine.</p><p>“Do you have anything at all?” Paul asks, then stops. <em>Remembering, </em>John imagines with a shiver. “Right, the vaseline.” John hands the jar up from the ground and Paul sets it against the wall, laying himself out parallel. He levers up with one elbow, hovering over John and consuming the picture he makes in white cloth and black leather.</p><p>While John intends to jump right into the buggering lesson, he isn’t displeased by the hungry way Paul’s mouth takes his. The beard scrapes his face and edges the sensation of tongue driving and swirling into his mouth. John relaxes into it. Yeah, he and Paul kiss, but they’ve been remiss not doing it this way. John lets his hands wander, gripping the plusher ass and the softer sides before settling for scrabbling at chest.</p><p>Paul’s fingers dig into John’s thighs, chasing the curve of them through his leather. His hands savor every scrap of John they land on, cradling and squeezing in turn. It’s different, doing things with an older man. His Paul is cocky and delightfully randy, but John hadn’t realized how uncoordinated their fooling around has been. This older Paul splays him out, fingers running over John like he’s a fretboard Paul owns. His hands scald every line they touch, claiming and proprietary like John is something he can hold between both palms, something to cherish and wring in turn. John thrashes and keens beneath the handling.</p><p>“C’mon, give us a show, Macca,” John breathes. Paul withdraws, his eyes thick and layered and John almost asks <em>what’s wrong</em> but then hands are slinking down, helping John tug off his pants. Paul takes a generous bit of Vaseline in hand, rubs it between his fingers.</p><p>“Gotta heat it up before you use it, unless you’re looking for the little shock.” A finger circles his entrance, and John vibrates against it, trying to jar it in already because the buildup is driving him mad. Paul chuckles, before dipping his first finger in. The stretch and burn isn’t mind-blowing, not as hot as rubbing one out, but Paul keeps him steadily stiff whispering instructions and details and demonstrating how exactly to widen someone out, stretch them properly— but it isn’t for some anonymous person, the instructions are for <em>Paul</em>. The deviancy is more than sufficient to keep John dripping over his stomach. When he has two fingers in it starts feeling a little more interesting. Then there’s a third and a jolt of lightning blooms along his lower stomach. John groans.</p><p>“Come on, Johnny,” Paul coaxes and his eyes are dark and consuming, lapping up John’s every twist and turn. He whispers now, beard rubbing up and over John’s face and fogging glasses. “Now imagine it like that, but bigger and blunter, pounding into you, and you’ve a good idea of it.” He reaches his free hand over. “If you need the last push—” he starts, but the moment a hand touches his bobbing dick, John blows all over the planes of his white undershirt.</p><p>Paul watches him unravel, shiny lips open and eyes glistening. Hungry maybe, or about to cry, he says, “John—”</p><p>He’s gone.</p><p>John sighs back into his pillow and then giggles at how funny Paul must look, popping back into the future with his hands covered in Vaseline and John’s fluids and a stiffy the size of the Kaiserkeller. That Paul is something he has to look forward to. He really ought to keep a calendar.</p><p> John cleans himself up by the time the boys roll in but he can’t help his shit-eating grin. It lasts until George says, “Oi, John, what happened to your face?”</p><p>His hands raise and stinging little bumps meet his fingertips. He curses.</p><p>“Looks like allergies to me,” Pete says. “Make-up or sommat?”</p><p>John meets eyes with Paul, whose flushed expression betrays a knowing. “Kiss on the wrong kinda bird?”</p><p>“Wouldn’t go that far,” John says, eyes glittering. Paul can laugh if he like now. Tomorrow and ever after, he’ll get his…</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>John blinks in the dark when the first stone hits his window. He’s lain awake, waiting for just this, but he still isn’t ready for it. Part of him thinks to just roll over and let the clattering sounds carry on through the night, but it won’t prevent this conversation from happening. He rolls out of bed, stomach rolling with him. Too much to drink, but also too little.</p><p>Glancing out the window, he sees the expected sight of Paul, pale face glowing in the dark. John gives the usual gesture and Paul starts scrabbling his way up the side to the house. The window raises slowly, carefully along the squeak of its track with all John’s practice lifting it for himself and others… mostly Paul.</p><p>Paul pulls himself up into the room, breath catching a little at the final exertion. When he straightens up he’s standing too-close as always. Now, John takes a step back and John’s adjusted eyes can read the shadows in his expression and the worried way they twist. “All right, John? You missed practice.”</p><p>John runs a hand through his hair. “Do us a favor?”</p><p>“What’s that?”</p><p>“Go back in time and stop me from giving it to Cynthia.”</p><p>Paul laughs a little at the end, high and disbelieving before the meaning sinks in. “You don’t mean…”</p><p>“Aye, up the duff. Me swimmers are stronger than I expected.” He wants another drink, but he’s already had too many earlier and now has to accept the steady, disappointing slide into sobriety.</p><p>“What’re you going to do?”</p><p>“Well, I’m seeing about a time-traveler first, aye?” He’s been thinking about it all night in the dark. Ways Paul could pop in the past, tell him off Cynthia, warn him to wrap it good, even give him a good one to the nuts— anything to stop John Lennon from having his way.</p><p>Paul frowns. “I can’t do anything about this, John. It’s already happened.”</p><p>“A time-traveler that believes in fate?” A sneer warps his face. “You must be joking with that.” </p><p>“Time isn’t as flexible as you think.” Paul’s arms cross, stiff. “The past is what it is, whatever was meant to happen has already happened.”</p><p>“Or you’re too coward to change it.” John’s voice cuts more in the quiet and his eyes meet Paul’s defiant ones. There’s no ground to be gained, nothing that bends for him and John feels his hope slip. He knew, somehow, that this would happen. He suspected that if Paul couldn't save John's sorry mam, he wouldn't be able to stop John wrecking Cynthia. He'd put off the conversation to cling to his hope, foolish as it was, but now there's only reality to face “Christ, I’m not ready to be a da and settle down, I’m only twenty.”</p><p>Paul’s tense posture drops. “You’re marrying her?”</p><p>“That’s what happens, isn’t it?” John demands.</p><p>“Right, yeah, of course, I mean…” Paul’s hands go to his hair, and he has no right to look so bewildered, so lost when John’s the one who’s losing it all. Paul has no right to look betrayed because even with everything between them, all the shining pieces, he’s always been a bloke. Paul is still Paul, is still unapologetically masculine, unapologetically daring, and has ununapologetically held and thrust into John with the cock nestled between his long legs.</p><p>John and Paul have always seen bits on the side. It’s what men their age do, keep a bird or three floating around for easy access. Even if John has a mate present and future making him twist and curl in private corners, he still needs a bird. People would talk otherwise, it’d be <em>odd </em>going on together with no women in his life. It’s what people do and despite all the peculiarity, John and Paul are still people.</p><p>Time and music bend them together, but simple logic of man + woman twists them apart. Something like this would always have to happen. It isn’t as though they were…</p><p>John sits on his bed, suddenly exhausted even though minutes earlier he’d been too disturbed to sleep. “That’s how it is, then.”</p><p>Paul’s hands shake now as he understands all the changes in the plans they’d dreamed up together. “I’m sorry, John. I can’t. <em>I can’t</em>.” His hands twist wretched and John believes him.</p><p>“Alright,” he says, exhaling long, eyes to the ceiling. “Alright. Come head, then, and lock the door.”</p><p>A click sounds and then Paul’s weight settles beside him on the bed. His shoes kick off and John senses him hesitate about whether to lie tops and tails or... “Door’s locked, right?” John asks, and Paul lets out a sigh, chin brushing John’s as he nods. “Then come on.”</p><p>John lays on his side and he closes his eyes as Paul’s hand trails across his torso, resting warm and familiar on his stomach. He thinks about Paul’s scent, staving off thoughts of impending marriage and domesticity.</p><p>“We’ll work it out,” Paul says. “You're stuck with me... Or is it the other way around?”</p><p>“It’s every way around with you,” John grumbles, but he takes some solace. Not matter his errors, his mistakes, his sudden lot in life, Paul can’t leave him. His stomach settles and he thinks maybe it will all work out.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>“Give us a second,” John growls, slamming the dressing room door behind him. Ringo laughs from behind the wood and seeing his reflection, John can understand why. The bird who dashed onto the stage during their set smeared and rubbed half the make-up off him with all her thrashing and wailing. Good god, he looks a right mess.</p><p>Hamburg was crowded, nary a spare moment, but Beatlemania raises the question of how many grasping hands the world possesses as John and the lads crawl for every iota of space. When he’s not on tour, John’s at home being a da now, or some artist's impression of it and he’s going long months without the excitement of a visit from Paul. He hankers for them, a glimpse of <em>more </em>than this oddly domestic popstar lifestyle but it’s hard to manage when it’s all work and playing and millions of unsafe eyes.</p><p>John rarely has time alone and when he does he’s usually working, or rushing from one place to another, so he isn’t even thinking of Paul as he dabs half a jar of pancake make-up over his face, cursing the day some eager girl rubbed it off him. He hopes he ruined her shirt.</p><p>A little trill interrupts him. “Oh, hullo Johnny.”</p><p>John looks in the mirror and catches the eyes of Paul’s reflection. The pad near drops from his fingers. “God, Paul, but you’ve gotten on, haven’t you?”</p><p>Paul laughs from his seat on the little make-up chair. The skin of his face has pulled forward, dropping down in creases and valleys, a long call from the smooth youth that has the girls calling him the cute Beatle today. Even his eyes have grown paler with age, settling for something between green and blue.</p><p>“I’ve put in a little time,” Paul smiles. It’s gentle on his worn face as he swings into a little ditty, “Down, down, down in the penitentiary.” John laughs, unable to mask the surprise.</p><p>“Remember that, do ye?” John smirks. “Wet many knickers singing in church choir?”</p><p>Part of him is hoping to shock elderly John, but he only earns himself a fond grin. “Oh aye, I’m still performing.”</p><p>“At your age? Do people pay you or are you paying them?” John says.</p><p>There’s something welcoming about him, like a proper grandfather up until he bats his lashes and it’s still all Paul. “I’m sweet sixty-four, you couldn’t imagine the crowds.”</p><p>John leans in. Because they’re standing on it now, this thing called Beatlemania. It’s a ship they’re riding and he’s wondering now how Paul’s still going, supposes they do reunion tours like all the old washed up people. Something of his thoughts must show because Paul reads across them and laughs.</p><p>John asks. “Am I performing these days too, then? The vengeance of the Nerk Twins?”</p><p>The expression drops on Paul’s face, meanders somewhere John’s never seen it go before, and he says, “I wonder, John. I wonder.”</p><p>He’s gone.</p><p>A rapping on the door interrupts John’s building thoughts and he picks up the pad again, tossing the make-up on.</p><p>“Hang on, hang on!” he complains. He gives himself a slightly manic grin in the mirror <em>Paul at sixty-fucking-four</em> before he trips out into the hallway and meets Ringo who signs autographs for fans. They rejoin the rest of the lads just to the side of the interview set up and John is treated to Brian chewing out Paul.</p><p>“How on <em>earth </em>did you catch your pant-leg on <em>fire</em>? And that ghastly smoking smell, goodness, Paul.”</p><p>Paul’s eyes meet his, something brilliant hovering between them that’s been blooming and spinning for years. “It’s John’s muck, isn’t it,” he says.</p><p>John holds his hands up. “Been doing me face, I’ve never seen muck in me life.”</p><p>“Keep still during the interview and don’t cross your legs, we don’t have the time for everyone to change suits,” Brian says. His face smoothes into perfect professionalism when the reporters filter in, as though he hasn’t a temper to knock down the better part of Bond street.</p><p>John and Paul are elbow to elbow, glowing up at the cameras and indulging the stupidest questions.</p><p>“And how did you get the idea for the name ‘Beatles?’” a reporter asks.</p><p>Paul has the nerve to nudge his shoe against John’s, smearing the plastic smelt of Mimi’s figurine as he says, “Oh it was John’s idea, wasn’t it?”</p><p>It’s intoxicating, this woven and multi-thread intimacy and he grins, nudges back. He tries to shelve the building questions and the way old Paul looked so thoughtful as he said <em>I wonder. </em>Grinning for the camera, John starts, “Well, when I was a wee lad, this man appeared on a flaming pie…”</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>There’s a bubble. It’s growing up under their feet, propelling the Beatles and haunting the end of every interview. The thing about a bubble is that it pops. The thing about theirs is that it doesn’t. John and the lads continue. They make music, sell out shows, and cause a disturbing clamor wherever they go. Where John goes, Paul follows, in one form or another. He finds Paul meditating in a closet one day, dressed in full yogi get-up, irate at the interruption and then sheepishly conceding he may have let his thoughts wander a bit.</p><p>“You think?” John asks, and grins when Paul throws a shirt at him.</p><p>They make another movie and as they wheedle as much as possible from the commitment, John shares a single knowing glance with Paul before pronouncing they want to film in the Bahamas.</p><p>Later, some skinny bloke from Liverpool falls into the warm ocean waters where John’s treading, and he has to laugh at the shocked expression, the way his pale face cranes towards the foreign sun. He doesn’t even think before pawing closer and kissing his cheek. “We’re lucky blokes, you and I.”</p><p>The shock on his face is hilarious as he pops off. John eases back to land and then makes shore into Paul again, giggling and high and ruining his lines. John razzles him against the side of their wood cabin and swallows every exhale, and every whispered, “Bahamas, John, <em>the Bahamas.</em>”</p><p>In the back of his garden at Weybridge, he finds Paul, drunk and spread out among the flowers in a hideous knit and boots fit for wading. A long beard trails around his short and curling hair. John sits with him and amusedly coaches him through his vague misery and ramblings about sheep. John wonders if they finally make a record that doesn’t sell, forcing Paul to join the farmer's force.</p><p>He even meets Grandpa Paul again but gets laughed out when he mentions his MBE.</p><p>If Paul goes where John does, then it’s also true that John follows Paul just as well. John’s Paul (and he is <em>John’s, </em>maybe always has been) is stubborn, charming and swelling splendidly under the light of fame. People are finally <em>listening</em> and the novelty hasn’t worn off that this thing between them is worth all that they believed and more. They still wash over each other in discreet siderooms at Weybridge and elbow-to-elbow writing sessions, their hands are tides pushing and pulling the other into crests of release. Sometimes they spread out on the carpet and John’s eyes will drift from the ceiling to land on the nude bend of Paul’s body and their eyes will meet. For a charged, wordless moment, they live in this third space, not mates or lovers, but <em>them. </em>John can’t call it anything, but within its unspoken periphery it’s beautiful. In the space where their bodies touch and where they don’t lies intimacy, something different than what John and Cyn claim between then. Then John blinks, shaking off stillness. Paul’s lips twitch and he rolls over to crash into John again.</p><p>Paul follows John following Paul following John; it’s exactly the same snake-tail eating nonsense that has dogged their whole betwixt existence. There is, however, one place Paul won’t follow, though John finds it very much on accident.</p><p>“Lysergic,” he’s oozing with excitement. They’ve taken a private corner in their pool party for John to present an idea among ideas. “Just one of these little sugar cubes and your mind will never be the same again!”</p><p>Ringo folds along easily, and George has already seen the truth of LSD. Paul bites his lip and his head jerks from either side.</p><p>“If it’s all the same, I like it as is.”</p><p>John’s lips twist. Something snarls at the unexpected barrier. Paul is the one he most wants to share this with, and Paul must also know that. “But think of the things you could see! Getting out of your head and really seeing the universe for what it is. It’s beautiful, Macca.”</p><p>Paul smiles, weak and shallow. “The present is just as nice. I’d balloon off with my daft head.”</p><p>John’s mouth closes. He gives the fourth sugar cube to Mal who splays out on the grass, touching each spiral of green with marveling fingers. John’s eyes drift to Paul, chatting with birds by the pool. It isn’t his fault, John knows. He’d probably spin off and off for hours on LSD… but that’s the point then, isn’t it? It’s an opportunity to escape. Time-traveling while high would be the most mind-bending, shattering thing. John can only imagine the illusion of time, but Paul <em>lives</em> it as every moment of broken focus propels him through time and space. If Paul could gain control of it, or open his mind to the universe’s opportunities… they could really go beyond, the two of them. John tries to convey it with his eyes but finds Paul looking away, following the line of some bird’s bikini.</p><p>Once again, John is confronted by the fundamental difference between them. Where John is trying to pry off as many fingers as possible on his grip on reality while still keeping his head on, Paul is reaching, and fumbling for every piece of solidity in his unstable life. Initially, John just thought it a balance between them, but now, it feels like an irreconcilable difference that shows in their music. Paul writes about love, and relationships and nothing of his mad slipping grasp. John’s pushing forward, pushing envelopes, putting the strange unreality of life on tape.</p><p>Paul who wants a day at Blackpool and John who wants the universe. Their orders got mixed and Paul’s off in the timestream while John lives in the suburbs. It’s maddening and he wants to lash out at his friend’s ingratitude. John would change the world with this thing between them. People could finally wake up to the illusions around them! <em>Time itself!</em> Fucking Paul.</p><p>But, it isn’t as bad as all that. They’re just slipping against each other, catching on the burrs of growing older and changing. It’s still good. John’s lips on Paul’s are still sweet, and what they do together is a curious stunning thing to behold. John nearly shits his pants laughing when Paul comes to the studio with a bit of granny music and trots out, “<em>Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four!”</em> He makes daft, batty eyes at John and it’s overwhelmingly fun even as everyone else goggles.</p><p>Later, John asks Paul if the “<em>losing his hair</em>” part is meant to be a hint.</p><p>Paul’s brow furrows. His eyes chase forward for a second before coming back to John and the present. He gives a maddening little shrug.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>They’re at a party, celebrating some record or some sale, something to do with Sgt. Pepper for people to moan and stroke their pricks about. John’s on the tail end of an acid trip and he’s barely paying attention when someone says something about cocaine.</p><p>John feels a little thrill, a chase of a memory. “Where’s that then?”</p><p>“In the other room.”</p><p>John wanders through the house, not all sure it’s his, and bumps into Paul the moment he pops back. John careens them sideways, maneuvering them into an empty room as he presses his mouth against Paul’s and tastes his younger self there.</p><p>Paul’s pupils are blown, gaping. He pistons his hips into John’s leg.  “Wide open, John.”</p><p>“You’ll be if you keep saying that.” John pushes Paul onto a desk, feeling the weight of appreciative eyes as he drops to his knees.</p><p>They still don’t call it this, that, or the other. John never comments on the slaked way Paul’s eyes trace John’s figure, how he looks through Jane but leans into John like he might leech the heat from his bones to own, the emotion ghosting parted-lips only to remain unspoken— No, John doesn’t think about those things. Instead, he slides Paul’s pants down and runs his fingers through the long dark hair of those legs, inhaling the masculine musky scent of arousal and rubbing his mustache into tender thighs.</p><p>Finally, John returns a favor nine years in the making.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Brian dies, and John feels his mind buffeting among waves again, asea, ears ringing too loud for the flashes and demands of reporters. All at once the full force of this fucking tangle of fans, expectations, and dwindling passion slams into John like a hammer and he’s bent over, gasping for reprieve. They’ve fucking had it. He searches for peace, finds George and Ringo, and later Paul.</p><p>Paul turns before John’s even assembled the inevitable question. “No, I hadn’t a clue, John.” This time it doesn’t make him feel better, instead it takes the breath from him and leaves him cold and gasping. Paul’s eyes are upset but cool and collected in a way that has John writhing with jealousy. It’s not goodbye for, Paul, is it? He still has chances to see him through the crowd, clinging to John’s past like a shadow. No wonder he sweeps past death the way he does. Something starts to fracture after that, and even the music that started it all isn’t enough to paper over the seams.</p><p>John gets stressed, feeling the walls closing in on him. He wants to run, but fame has blocked his every avenue of escape. The only route open now is escape within his mind. It’s hard to do because John is a BEATLE, which begins to mean that he owes other people satisfaction for their needs. John doesn’t belong to himself anymore and everyone needs a piece of Lennon; Cynthia, Julian, the press, the fans, the band, Paul— and when he does find himself a spare moment, who should arrive but Paul?</p><p>Paul, fresh off the number one of <em>Love Me Do, </em>interrupting John’s increasingly desperate acid-drops to giggle and bounce around, so tenderfooted and fucking elated that John shouts him out. Paul at twelve, talking about some bully at school and making John pick up the pieces of his ego and be kind when he only wants to scream. When he mentions the visit to Paul while fixing a joint behind the screen of the recording studio, Paul’s eyes gleam, grateful but also slaked like an assumption rewarded. The <em>knowing </em>fills John with such ire he has to leave early. It’s Paul, Paul, Paul, always in different states, different dress, but the nostalgia or the glimpses into the future don’t thrill him anymore, instead they make him weary, wondering <em>how long </em>do they have to keep going? How long will this two-headed Lennon-McCartney creature keep running around the vinyl track?</p><p>He wants out, from life, music, and the past that Paul can’t change.</p><p>Yoko is the way out; John feels it in his bones. There’s something escapist and <em>above</em> about her. She’s a step completely out of the Beatles and a way around the rotten noose he’s woven for himself. How could he do less but fall into it? Yoko rolls into his desperate clawing with ease, tagging along and letting him take and take from her the way Paul does from him. In exchange she whispers to him, her funny ideas and unique perspective and a lot of it is true, isn’t it? She understands John and the world a lot better than John ever has so he starts toting her with him everywhere he can. Her sudden prominent presence causes tension in the band, John senses it like a festering wound, but he doesn’t care. He half wants the thread to snap at this point and send them all into free-fall.</p><p>George was keen to the tension before any of them, restless on tour, frustrated with his limited output. He and John gravitate together, knowing the band is a growing unwellness in their lives. Paul, on the other hand, strains and grips to keep everything together, to keep producing music under the Beatle name. He starts cracking, snapping, unveiling the uglier side that the public’s never known. John has, but it doesn’t mean he welcomes it.</p><p>Yoko has a showing today, so John’s on his own in the studio, trying to nail down some fingerpicking. He’s getting somewhere in practicing when Paul pops into existence.</p><p>John raises his head and snarls, “Could you wait five fucking seconds so I can bloody think?” He half hopes it’s something young and soft to set his teeth into and break the chain of expectation, but it’s not a younger Paul or an older one; this Paul looks the same as today’s and if he weren’t wearing such a daft red suit, John would have thought it was the same person.</p><p>Paul rubs his face, buries his eyes in his ugly sleeves and says, “Can’t exactly control it, can I?”</p><p>“What are you, then?” John demands. “This week or last?”</p><p>“Wouldn’t know, would you? On that much heroin?” Paul throws his hands up. “Dear Prudence, is it? I’m next week. You fuck, you gave me this shit-grin and a little wave in the morning. God, you’re just—”</p><p>“Just what Paul? Think I’m enjoying meself?” John snaps. “What’s to enjoy? You’ve sucked all the fun from the music that even Ringo doesn’t want to play on your tracks.”</p><p>Paul grumbles. “He comes back soon.”</p><p>“Or you’ll just do it yourself, won’t you?” John sneers. “Don’t need any of us when you have the Paul McCartney band.”</p><p>“It isn’t that I don’t want—”</p><p>The universe if merciful for once, in that it lets John live another day without having to hear about what Paul wants, wants, wants. He kicks up a fit with the Paul of now, and next week, when Paul comes in wearing an awful over-stylish suit, John bares his teeth. He wonders if he keeps his hand down if he’ll make a paradox to break the damn system, but in the end, he waves Paul off into an unpleasant argument in the past. Later, Paul slams into John’s recording session with fresh ire only to meet John’s heroin fueled grin. There will be no more talking today.</p><p>“Yoko, Yoko,” John whispers, crawling into her lap on the couch of Ringo’s flat. “You’ve got to stay with me, from now on you can’t leave me ever.” His eyes feel dazed, hazy with he high as he says. “My left hand, always by my side. And that’ll keep the bad things away.”</p><p>“I’ll keep it all away, John,” she says, and then sniffs her line of heroin. “Just let me in.” Their foreheads knock together, and he stares into her, hoping to take her within him and make himself utterly unJohn.</p><p>Yoko obeys him; she becomes his shadow. He never tells her what haunts his tail, and she understands ghosts anyways, tells him tales from Japan of the kind of creatures that would rattle the <em>shoji </em>doors and how it made her grandmother smile. John’s isn’t the friendly ghost, but she must know.</p><p>Paul can’t appear when it isn’t safe, and Yoko’s distaste for him is the most blessed smokescreen in his life. Paul catches on, of course he does, and he casts these looks, accusing and covetous, whispering, <em>you were mine </em>and John only offers his crooked manic grin back. Finally, he’s a step ahead, living without interruptions. For the first time in <em>years, </em>he has control of his life even as the band is spiraling out.</p><p>His control comes at the cost of intimacy with Paul, but it’s all right. He doesn’t need that when he has Yoko, someone who asks less of John, someone who gets the need to let go of themselves.</p><p>His thing with Paul, whatever unnamed business they had, ends. Since it was never put into words, John doesn’t feel bad for letting the passion and tension drop, meeting Paul’s ardor with cool contempt. Paul flinches in wounded surprise before quickly growing keen to the new rules, building a mask of his own so polished and professional that John’s lost the literacy to read his face.</p><p>It’s a startling realization, how quickly they can backtrack from perfect unison, and John finds himself sitting on the stoop of Ringo’s apartment one late night. Yoko sleeps above, unaware of his departure. John doesn’t need Paul, but maybe he misses him a little, even with the fresh freedom that is Yoko’s embrace.</p><p>The exhale that comes with the clatter-thump of Paul’s arrival is sheer relief, and John’s voice is soft to his own ears. “There you are.” John snubs out his cigarette, taking in Paul beneath the night glow.</p><p>Paul startles as he sees him, gasps a little. His hair’s shorter and a little wavy, reminiscent of something earlier and simpler in their lives and it’s soothing. No cryptids here tonight. The hot sweat of Paul’s hands is uncomfortable, and John frowns even as he takes the grip in his. He wonders where this Paul dropped in from, but he isn’t going to waste this time. He missed Paul, missed the drag of past and future. There’s no one to see them in the light and he sidles closer.</p><p>“I knew this would happen,” Paul whispers.</p><p>John grins. “Did you? You are the time-traveler.” It’s easy tipping their mouths together, so much cleaner than the rough fit now. This Paul he can still open up to, and maybe he can learn to do it again, maybe it’s not too late… He frowns at the sweet, sour taste of him. Paul shudders, resting his cheek against John’s for a moment.</p><p>“You’re so cool,” Paul murmurs, and a bead of sweat rolls down his forehead and onto John’s. His eyes drag open, dilated, and John’s stomach drops. He jerks back, almost reeling over the curb.</p><p>“Are you… are you high?” John asks, barely keeping his temper in check.</p><p>Paul groans, hands tucking into his sides tightly. “You can tell, can’t you? Just from looking at me. They all know, every one of ‘em.”</p><p>“What are you on, Paul?” John demands, something high and coiled in his throat, waiting. Paul blinks as he takes him by the shoulder, tries pulling in on himself only to stare at the concrete and list sideways. “Did you take Lysergic?”</p><p>“I knew this would happen,” Paul says. He makes no sound when John drops his grasp and lets him fall on the brickwork.</p><p>“How <em>could you,</em> without me? After all the times I asked you, after all you said you’d never do it!” Judgemental Paul who peered down his nose at John the whole time —as though he was weak for needing the aid of substances to gain half the shattering understanding that Paul just inherited from breathing— had skipped off to drop acid without John and kept it a bloody secret.</p><p>Paul levers himself up, marveling at the scrapes and small beads of blood. “I knew this would happen.”</p><p>“What?” John snaps, stepping forward.</p><p>“If I dropped, I’d find you. Always <em>you.” </em>Paul opens and closes his hands before dragging his eyes up to meet John’s. “You’re so intense, John, and cannier with my tripping.” He shivers, a full-body affair. “You’re jealous. You’ll push me somewhere I don’t want to go. You don’t know how frightening time is. I have to be safe, safe as houses.”</p><p>John feels subzero, anger so hot it’s cold and he grins now. “What? Afraid I’ll remind you about dropping into voids? How you vanish from the air and it’s like you’ve never been there at all?” The hits land, making Paul shudder and grind his palms into the wall, his wide eyes searching for stability only to find John’s cheerful ire. “I never would say such to you, not to someone I actually cared about. Not to someone who’s been so honest and open with me, and not <em>lied </em>about dropping, you fucking coward. Who are you with, Paul? Hm? Are they going to save you? Are you so much happier doing it with them?”</p><p>Paul slumps into the brick, pressing his head into it like it might welcome him into its patchwork. “Tara,” he whispers. “John, no, John.”</p><p>His hand flails out, trying to catch John’s sleeve as he walks past towards the door. John spares a single look back, sees through what he first saw as uncomplicated and pure as the beginning of an incurable rot.</p><p>“I—“ Paul starts, but it’s too late.</p><p>John leaves this time, ignoring the pitiful moans as the door latches behind him.</p><p>He doesn’t glance out the window. Instead, he tucks himself into bed with Yoko. Her eyes peer out of the dark wave of her hair. “The bed was cold,” she says.</p><p>“Not for long,” he promises, pressing his lips into his neck and burying his frustration in her skin.</p><p>The next day he grins, curling a finger towards Paul, loving the still-eager way he jumps closer despite the wary eyes. “Come on, I’ve something I want you to listen to, Yoko and me recorded it last night. Let’s everyone have a listen…”</p><p>He makes sharp eye-contact with Paul as the playful sounds of lovemaking fill the air. There’s a tremor in the energy between them, bouncing along a glass line that finally caves to the nicks and cracks and shatters all at once behind Paul’s eyes, irreparable.</p><p>“That’s an interesting one,” Paul says, so distantly that John can finally breathe.</p><p>It’s easier once they’ve broken. Easier to fall into patterns and expectations of unhappiness. Paul tries to keep things together and John does what he can to make that difficult even if it's only disengaging.</p><p>Paul coaxes them into making another album and making a movie. It fixes nothing, only widens the gap.</p><p>During the filming, Paul leaves the bathroom, wiping his hands on his jacket and looking flushed and thoroughly worked up in his long black suit. John glares from his perch with Yoko, pleased by the ashamed way his head ducks. He hopes he gave Paul fucking crabs. Good luck explaining that to Linda.</p><p>John tightens his grip on Yoko’s ankle and tries to console himself. His past is what it is, but he’s safe now, he’s safe with Yoko. With her, he can ignore the twinge in his chest as he remembers nineteen in Hamburg, begging anyone to teach him how to make Paul writhe…</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>When Paul sits at the piano and explains how he ‘dreamt’ of his mother while visiting home, eyes ducking shyly, John wants to throw a bloody shoe at him and the whole universe for this fucking lot he calls his life.</p><p> </p><p>+</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>.<br/>.<br/>.</p><p>Next chapter coming in about a week. Thank you very much for reading this little story!</p><p>I decided to splice this chapter after adding a section, so the story will be complete in 4 chapters, not three.</p><p>Leave a comment, if you like~❤️</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Portrait of a Marriage</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A time-traveler can't fix everything...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title comes from "Portrait of a Marriage" by Nigel Nicholson. According to May Pang's book "Loving John," he read the novel and was disturbed "by the theme of sexual incompatibility in the midst of great emotional attraction and the fact that no matter how hard one tries, no matter how hard one tries, a marriage may always remain incomplete." Please read further and brilliant analysis done on <a href="https://thecoleopterawithana.tumblr.com/post/190952180315/when-he-wanted-to-john-could-be-an-avid-reader">TUMBLR.</a></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>+</p>
<p>John taps ash into a tray and peers out the window. New York City scurries beneath him, the same anxious bundle of nerves and streets as the day before. He keeps hoping he’ll see a taxi rounding the corner, popping open to reveal Mother and Sean… His toes curl beneath him, and he feels so strung out and wanting.</p>
<p>He was alone before when they were fighting during that lost weekend, but the whole stretch of time has become a shadowy thing under Mother’s cover, and John likes it that way. If he wasn’t with her, he was with May, and if he wasn’t with either of them, he was roaring drunk and a danger to the furniture. It’s been so long that he doesn’t realize what he’s forgotten until heavy shoes meet white carpet. The memory echoes in a million places and zaps him to standing.</p>
<p>“This is very nice, isn’t it?” Paul, reeking of beer and cigarettes, his leathers painted on the young jut of him. God, he was thin then, hair a daft mess spilling into his face. Six or seven years have passed since the last visit and the wave of nostalgia stuns him.</p>
<p>John’s voice comes a little rusty but rejoining the strange circle without thought. “I’ve not done bad.”</p>
<p>Paul looks him over too, and John really isn’t sure what there is to see. Never enjoyed mirrors and hasn’t a reason to indulge them when he’s so alone. Paul’s eyes flicker around again to the stark walls. “Haven’t painted yet?”</p>
<p>“Going to hire a muralist, aren’t we?” John replies. It’s something he would have done back then when he believed excess of expression would satisfy the emptiness rattling about his ribcage, not that Paul’s in on the joke. He sees the way Paul shivers, and John’s thoughts linger over the thoughtless <em>we</em>… He shifts away from correcting Paul’s misunderstanding and steps forward into his space. It’s shocking how easily Paul lets him, the way his posture blooms and unfolds to receive him.</p>
<p>He’s so young… none of the veneers of wealth and fashion, the weight of Rock and Roll Icon. He’s just little Paulie, fresh like veal and John has broken his macrobiotic diet for less. It’s the boredom, he tells himself, and just desserts for the way Paul took him in Hamburg.</p>
<p>“You know what you’re doing, Paul?” John wonders, letting his eyes speak for him as he strokes Paul’s shoulder. Paul hears him, breaking into that clean blush that was wiped away by arrogance and too many people panting after his shit…</p>
<p>“John.” Paul jerks away. John loosens his over-tight grip and reaches for the cigarette smoking on the ashtray.</p>
<p>“Sorry… Wouldn’t want me finding another man’s fingerprints on you, would we?” John puts the cigarette in Paul’s mouth, watching the smoke curl around his face and tangle in greased curls.</p>
<p>“I think he’d know whose they were,” Paul replies, his thin eyebrow lifting with his exhale. “After all we are, right?”</p>
<p>“Fishing, Macca, that’s no good.” John traces his fingers over Paul’s lips before taking away the cigarette. He snubs it in the tray and presses his nose into Paul’s neck. “Have you been with a man properly yet?”</p>
<p>“You can’t smell it… Now who’s fishing.” He squirms when John’s tongue strokes the curve of his neck, hips canting and he’s so <em>easy. </em>“We tried a little something last week, but I think we did something wrong.”</p>
<p>“To me wrist, was it?” John asks, and Paul cringes. “Suppose I could show you the proper way of it. Just so long as you keep it between us.”</p>
<p>“Keeping secrets from yourself? Daft lad.”</p>
<p>John never looks the truth head-on if he can help it. He pushes Paul onto the plush couch and crowds his space, shoving a bony knee between Paul’s legs to pry them open. Trembling, they unfurl for him. Really, they swing, effortless and well-oiled by his past self.</p>
<p>Pupils blown, Paul licks his lips, says, “I’ll need help with these.” John takes him out of his leathers, peeling them off like an orange rind and finding sweet flesh below. It feels like stealing from his younger self, and it makes John moan as his knuckles bottom out in Paul and he scissors. That younger him can’t appreciate what he has, the way everything after topples like dominos, the wretch of fame. The coconut oil is sweet-smelling, a perfect complement to Paul’s decadent jerks and cries as John sinks his dick in. It’s tight, and if Paul weren’t so high on preludin he’d be aching, but as it is he starts jerking back, pulling John into him and groaning. John concedes, giving shallow insufficient jabs to the heated center.</p>
<p>“C’mon, John! More!” Paul begs, whines. John gives him more, thrusting in and out and earning exhilarated cries that nearly peak— John takes a grip on Paul’s prick and squeezes at the base, denying release. Paul keens, thrusting ineffectively, but John won’t let it go, not yet, not so quickly, it’s too soon. He remembers playing <em>I Saw Her Standing There </em>with Elton and scanning the crowd to find one daft face and the face is here <em>at last</em>.</p>
<p>His free hand strokes and takes tactile record of Paul’s skin, soaking in the sparse hair and the too-even complexion and John’s just bored, just using him, just getting revenge—</p>
<p>Paul’s eyes snap open, tearing up and beautiful and he says, “Yes, John, yes!”</p>
<p>It feels like intimacy, like coming back home and John comes hard, loosening his grip for Paul to shoot spirals over the white couch and his stomach.</p>
<p>The moment unwinds as they pant and heave air.</p>
<p>“Fancy a cigarette?” Paul asks, too young to read John’s intense and wordless shock at it all. John slumps into the couch, preparing a cigarette for each of them. He watches Paul shimmy, shimmy, shake into his leathers again, wiping off the spare cum with his hand the way only the young men can. He takes long puffs of the cigarette.</p>
<p>“I’ve been gasping for one,” he says. “Haven’t had any luck bumming… until now I suppose.” He smiles, corner to corner, unchipped teeth, and John wonders how they were diverted, where they took the wrong turn. He reaches out, trying to catch hold of Paul—</p>
<p>He’s gone.</p>
<p>The last trails of smoke climb to the ceiling and vanish.</p>
<p>John groans and smokes his cigarette to the end before looking up couch-cleaners in the yellow pages.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When Paul shows up at his door the next day, looking anxious and embarrassed through the eyehole, John hesitates only slightly before opening the door.</p>
<p>They look at each other for a long moment before Paul groans and runs his hands through his chin-length hair. “I’ve missed me, haven’t I?”</p>
<p>John pulls his lips, aims for a smile amid the history bearing down on them, some of it linking through only yesterday. “You’re right here, aren’t you?” His chewing gum clicks in his teeth as he mulls Paul’s words. “Thought you could stop it then?”</p>
<p>Paul shakes his head. “No… Thinking I could was nice. Thought I might try to save me some embarrassment.”</p>
<p>“Always been too late for that,” John quips. “Take your shoes off.”</p>
<p>Paul’s smile is tentative but genuine. They’ve both had each other, and it’s enough for a truce. They spend the day faffing about, irritating each other and smoking joints and laughing. It feels a little like the beginning, the way they step around each other and the newness, but John reaps genuine enjoyment. That Paul hasn’t seen this area of his life is a novelty and he likes showing it off.</p>
<p>At least he understands why Paul always looked at him the way he did when he tripped from this era, why his eyes glossed over John like he was a childhood favorite, something that made Paul smile even if it was too sweet to stomach now; Paul and he had broken apart in an irreversible kind of way. It never could be easy like childhood again. For all that their reunion feels like coming together, they’re rejoining with a simpler weave. Getting back to the basics, getting back to <em>friends…</em> The couch looms between them, history unspoken, a low reddening of Paul’s neck. John steers them away from it where he can.</p>
<p>John doesn’t ask about any tripping Paul’s done, and Paul doesn’t ask about any version of himself popping in. John’s distantly disappointed. He thought maybe Paul would… but no, just the usual shadows chasing around Paul’s eyes, unknowable to John. He focuses on what they do have, and it feels simpler, good.</p>
<p>What’s their fling compared to the friendship they had? When night falls and he’s in bed with Mother again, John admits that he can’t remember the one without the other. He can’t remember a time he didn’t <em>notice </em>Paul and want. Even now, the clip of hair over his shoulders feels soft and tactile in John’s recollection…</p>
<p>He isn’t sure what to do about it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>John cranes his neck from the bench, keeping Sean always just in sight as he toddles around the sandbox. It’s one of the cleaner parks in New York, but it doesn’t stop John from leveling his sharp eyes on his little boy as often possible. He’s keeping his distance though. Mother’s read this book about attachment with children, and John wants Sean to be confident, to be able to stand on his own in a way John never quite could. He’s a safe twenty steps away, watching and cheering on his beautiful boy. There are other kids in the park, parents too, and he’s already waved a couple off with nasty looks when they veered to approach him. There’s movement in the corner of his eyes and he turns, anticipating another mother keen to have her son hear <em>Yesterday </em>straight from the Lennon’s lips but—</p>
<p>It’s a little boy around Sean’s age, sobbing to himself. John searches for a parent or anyone coming to help the tyke when he notices the wide-eyed shock on the kid, the way his eyes chase the trees and the buildings looming in the distance. His shorts and button-up look hilariously formal and John twitches. Surely not…</p>
<p>“Paul?” he calls. The head snaps around, and John pulls himself to his feet.</p>
<p>“How’d’ye know me name?” Christ, John hasn’t heard an accent that thick in years. John resists a giggle. Closer now, his shadow stretches too long over the pale, tear-soaked face so he aims to fall into a crouch. He misses and lands on his ass. An exhale forces out. “I’m too old for this.”</p>
<p>Paul hiccups a laugh but falls back into stunned staring. “Where am I?”</p>
<p>“You’re in America. You’ve taken a little trip,” John says, slipping into the voice he uses with Sean by habit. A new thought dawns on him. “You’ve taken trips before this, aye? Trips like this?”</p>
<p>“Just to the corner and the grocers, never to ‘merica.” Paul bites his lip, apparently not remembering the Lennon-Smith pantry incident. “Where is she? I want me mummy.”</p>
<p>John makes shushing noises, and his hand slowly rests on Paul’s shoulder. “She’s not here now, but you’ll see her soon. I promise, any minute now you’ll be right back with her like you never left.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Did I do one of mummy’s little hops?” Paul asks after a moment.</p>
<p>“Yeah,” John says in a rush. “Yeah, that’s just it.”</p>
<p>“She said I would.” His eyes blink up at John. “She said I’d be with me person though, and not to worry none. Izzat you?”</p>
<p>John exhales hard before rubbing his face. For a second, he thinks about lying, but what little good it would do. “Yeah, that’s me.” For better, for worse, and all that lives in between, it’s true. “I’m John.”</p>
<p>“Paul.” Paul rubs his eyes. He’s smiling now, tremulous. Globs of snot drip down and John snorts. The man, the myth, and the legend. “Can I… can I stay with ye til I go back?”</p>
<p>“Sure.” John pulls a tissue from his backpack with all the little necessary things for Sean. Paul rubs his face, and John glances at the sandbox, pleased to see Sean playing undisturbed.</p>
<p>A strangeness takes his stomach. “Can I introduce you to someone?” Paul nods and hustles to stay in the shelter of John’s stride as they approach the sandbox. “This is Paul, Sean. And Paul, say hello to Sean.” They’ve never met, except, John’s realizing, with this <em>they have. </em>No wonder Paul always asked after his lad, hoping to meet him.</p>
<p>“Hullo,” Paul says, and then sticks out his grubby hand the way his proper mam taught him to ‘say hello.’ Sean goggles and John barely muffles his laughs.</p>
<p>“You’re supposed to shake it, Sean. Like adults do, see?” John demonstrates, engulfing the small palm within his own, affecting a proper air. “How d’ye do, master McCartney?”</p>
<p>Paul replies, solemn. “Just fine, thanks.”</p>
<p>Sean tries, giving an enthusiastic hammering up and down. Paul looks shocked, but then giggles. The two spiral into making structures and burying things, leaving John very much forgotten.</p>
<p>“You’ve a funny accent.”</p>
<p>“No, you do.”</p>
<p>“No, I haven’t.”</p>
<p>“Have so. Let’s put the castle here.”</p>
<p>“It’s better here, innit?”</p>
<p>Watching Paul and Sean play, an eerie glee shudders through John, the impossibility of the universe. He tilts himself up to the sky and marvels at it all.</p>
<p>Christ, but what a laugh.</p>
<p>Paul blinks up, stares at John’s neck craning under the sun and vibrating with mirth, and if there’s awe there, John can forgive him his mistakes just this once.</p>
<p>Later, back at the Dakota, John finds his hands wandering towards the phone, starting to dial only to hang up. Paul knows about it already. An anxious cigarette later and he returns to the phone, thumbing the cord. The nostalgic sod would love to ooze over the shared memory, would probably smile just to hear John’s voice calling. The thought of Linda answering has him stepping full away. Paul has better things to do than remember what will only ever be the past.</p>
<p>“Daddy,” Sean calls from the other room. John impulsively pulls the cord out and trails away. John has better things to do too.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In 1980, he dies.</p>
<p>John’s seen guns before, held them and shot them, hated them and written songs about them. He’s never seen a gun this way before, with the muzzle pointing towards him, dark eyehole in the middle blinking certain death and John’s heart skips.</p>
<p>Images chase through his mind, pouring into one another, the tides at Blackpool, Paul’s lost hair on piano keys, his mother’s banjo twanging astride her voice, the gaping void of a million Hamburg nights, acid dreams, Yoko, SeanPaulGeorgeandRingo. There’s love and twisted desire and the rattling pianos jangling their final notes.</p>
<p>John remembers the twist of old Paul’s lips as he murmured, <em>I wonder. </em>The way he’d looked at John like something he’d made peace with despite the fuss they’ve kicked at each other.</p>
<p>Paul wasn’t the ghost, John is, and he feels a startling certainty that this is the end. Old Jim McCartney married to a dead woman and he thinks of her and of his own children, both of them now, and Yoko, and Paul… he ‘s so glad they made up, even though it wasn’t— couldn’t be what— He’s never even known what they had, really. Friendship’s never cut it.</p>
<p>The gun goes off</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>bang</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>bang</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>bang</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>bang</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>Blood on his hands, dripping warm and strange, not at all like the water he looks into, the pale blue eyes aged out of pigment. Paul gasps, smiles, reaches, eyes spilling a million emotions before the light spirits away.</p>
<p>John breathes, the first time in his life for how the world spins around him.</p>
<p>“John, John, are you okay? Were you shot? John?!” Yoko’s fingers flow over and off him but John can’t register them, can’t tear his eyes away from the dead old man slumped in his arms.</p>
<p>Paul is dead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>No disrespect intended, this is simply an exercise in fiction. Last chapter will come within a week and it will be LONG. Thank you for all the support so far! This comments section is popping like it's LJ.</p>
<p>Leave a comment, if you like❣️~</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Through the Looking Glass and What John and Paul Found There</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>John lives.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title from one of John's reported favorite books, "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" by Lewis Caroll.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>+</p>
<p>Paul is dead.</p>
<p>Everything after is a parade of sensations that don’t prick the surface of John’s mind. Lights spin red and blue over the ground and walls, the wet bloodied cement. Footfalls sound distant, a chase amid the shouts to get under cover. Fingers reach to pry the body free and John startles then. He fights, yells, and foams.</p>
<p>“He’s dead, John!” Yoko screams. “Please, let them help!”</p>
<p>His grip slackens and the weight anchoring him is snatched away into an ambulance. People are steering him, petting him, patting him and under the wave of hands, John can’t do anything but think of Paul, giving him such a look, and not a lick of surprise. Walking into the bullets…</p>
<p>The surface tension breaks and John teeters up, nausea boiling in his stomach and then spilling over as he heaves on ruined concrete. American accents jangle, buzzing about protection and guards and armed response but John shakes his head, tries to shift away from the grips.</p>
<p>“Scotland,” he says. “I need to go to Scotland.” No one hears him and it’s like John is dead the way people phase around him. “Paul is dead,” John murmurs to Yoko, who grips his shoulder and mutedly kisses his chin around tears.</p>
<p>Yoko’s brows draw together like dark curtains. “Was that his name?” She doesn’t understand. He’s never told her, never could, and this was something even she couldn’t suspect. The loneliness of his loss slams into John.</p>
<p>Paul is dead and only John is there to mourn over the stain.</p>
<p>It’s not his Paul though, he tries to remind himself. This Paul was so old and creased Yoko couldn’t recognize him. Not his Paul, not <em>yet</em>. “Is he in Scotland? Do you know?”</p>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“Paul!” John screams into the shock of her wan face. “I need to see him, stop him from…”</p>
<p>Yoko shakes, head jerking to the side. “John, I don’t know what I think you saw, but that old man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He just appeared.”</p>
<p>“Fuck off, Yoko, you don’t know what you’re saying.” His teeth bare and he cranes over her. “I <em>know </em>what I saw, I’m the only one that knows what happened.” Her face shudders, wet with tears. Paul and the overwhelming truth of what he <em>fucking did the daft bastard</em>— looms between them, like a barrier John suspected and she never knew existed.</p>
<p>She’s crying for him, for shock, but who’s crying for <em>Paul?</em></p>
<p>The police break their protective line, trying to talk reasonably about getting to cover, going to an unknown location. They won’t let John leave their sight, so Yoko goes in to get Sean and pack. John argues to be taken to an airport.</p>
<p>“Sir, Mr. Lennon, if you can please cooperate—”</p>
<p>“I have to see him… get out of my face. Not going anywhere with you, you’re the ones what let him get shot, aren’t you?!”</p>
<p>“Daddy?” Sean, sleep-tousled by Yoko’s side, bewildered. John imagines he was woken by the pops and swoops down to collect his beautiful boy if only to hide his young face from the hideous stain of <em>Paul. </em>The mad bastard.</p>
<p>He mutters nonsense into Sean’s hair, dipping to press kisses on his face. He almost lost this… The shock is settling in now, numb like winter nights, and when they move to a car and some blank apartment, John isn’t entirely cognizant of it. Someone pushes him into a shower and he dips in and out of awareness, thinking about their tiled shower back home, Yoko’s hair pressed against it as he loved her along the water… he thinks of the white couch in the corner where he fucked into Paul, gasping and leaning up with such life—</p>
<p>He has to see him, but no one listens to his requests, shoving tea and cigarette at him, shuffling him into bed where Yoko curls around like ivy and John stares at the ceiling thinking of blue eyes, <em>knowing.</em></p>
<p>He crawls out and goes to Sean’s room, passing the night staring at his child and thinking about Paul bawling his eyes out lit by motes of light passing through park trees.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Yoko calls in the morning but doesn’t have luck at any of Paul’s residences. “He’s probably on his way here, John.” Further language teeters on her lips but John looks away from her, taking Sean with him into the other room. He shouts her out when she tries to join them.</p>
<p>“He won’t appear if you’re here. He might… he might drop in.” John would give just about anything to see Paul again, smiling and unpunctured, harkened by the da-DA of shoes hitting the floor— John would even give his left hand.</p>
<p>She stares at him like he’s crazy and he is, but it’s coded under the cover of shock and everyone is forced into gentle servitude of his whims. She sits against the door like a betrayed thing, slipping her hair through the cracks and peeking through until John shoves a blanket over the gap. Only Sean is safe as houses. They read books and play. There’s an unrooted shock keeping Sean temperate and mild, goggling at the strange situation, eyes flipping to the unfamiliar dark windows but not asking to go outside. He lets John watch him and sit with him and try to smother the anxieties dwelling in his chest and cope with the heartbreaking gratitude for a future shared together.</p>
<p>John pens a letter to Julian, spilling out the mess of his heart and shuffling it under the door for someone to mail. They’ve spoken on the phone already and cried, but sometimes writing is the only thing to pull John’s truth from his struggling mouth.</p>
<p>Another night passes by Sean’s bed after John startled awake, face full of tears and regrets. During the day, carefully selected visitors filter in but John won’t see them. They’re the wrong people. Yoko tells him at meals, Sean perched on her lap, about all the callers and well-wishers.</p>
<p>“You should keep the phone line clear.” John fiddles with the toast on his plate, crushing the crisp edges into crumbs. “In case he calls.”</p>
<p>Yoko’s mouth opens and he sees her searching for a way to explain that the world isn’t only for Paul, but John’s has been, from twelve to thirty and even when he ran, it was Paul in his leathers, in the park, and watching SNL. What are ten years to everything they’ve shared in and out of order?</p>
<p>It must show on his face because neither of them says more. John reclaims Sean and retreats to the room, diming his senses against the buzz of visiting voices that are all wrong.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The newspaper article, when it comes, reads “A NEAR MISS: ROCKSTAR JOHN LENNON SAVED BY NEW YORK FAN.” John makes it to the part about the unidentifiable dental records before he has to set it down. The police come (have never left) and ask if he knew the man.</p>
<p>“He was Paul,” John says.</p>
<p>Yoko leaps in from her place on the other end of the couch. “Paul was someone John met in Central Park, walking around.”</p>
<p>John hasn’t the energy to correct her lie. Paul met him in a park once, it’s true enough. The police jot this down, looking uncomfortable despite their dogged, professional eye-contact. They explain what further they know.</p>
<p>The shooter, Mark Chapman, wanted to kill someone famous. "It could have been David Bowie," the police officer says.</p>
<p>He did kill someone famous, he killed Paul McCartney, John doesn’t say. He thinks about it later in the bathroom, staring at his unremarkable visage for so long that Yoko comes to lean against the door and whisper to him. He screams for her to get away and settles in the bathtub, thinking he might catch any apparition that lands with the full length of his body.</p>
<p>No one comes or vanishes but John spends the whole night there just in case.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>John stares at the next page of Sean’s book. It’s a quaint tale of a cat and a dog, something about forgiveness in the face of difference. The shade of blue coloring the sea brings back those eyes and suddenly, John’s certain he’ll never see Paul again. He was sure Paul was old, but maybe not, maybe the hazel drained out with the blood leaving only blue sightlessness. He can’t remember anymore, but now he pictures it with his Paul, as he last saw him, hair sweeping shoulders, sweeping into the gun’s spray—</p>
<p>“John?” There’s a rap on the door, Yoko’s nails scraping the wood. “John, you have a guest.”</p>
<p>“Hullo? John? Are you there?”</p>
<p>John drops the book and scrambles to the door, fingers missing the lock twice before it unlatches and hinges open.</p>
<p>Paul, eyes straddling brown and green, hair a shade greyer and cut short over his care-worn face. “Jesus Christ, Paul!” John’s hands wring into the cardigan, winding it through his fists like he could stop Paul from ever slipping away again and stepping to New York.</p>
<p>His lips twist, mournful, “I’m sorry, John, I heard on the news—”</p>
<p>That’s as far as he gets before John knocks their chins together and then they’re kissing. Paul tastes the same, mouth sweet with recent tea, and salty too. John realizes he’s crying.</p>
<p>The separate, noses still brushing against each other as John shouts, “How could you?! You fucking bastard!” Sean lets out a little whimper, and John stares down at his son watching him, grows aware of Linda’s wide eyes and Yoko’s stares. He unclenches his grip, staggers back. “I can’t…”</p>
<p>Yoko extends her hand and Sean goes to her, burying his head in her legs as she pivots away. Linda trails after, blinking hard. Paul’s face twists with bewilderment and worry, eyes following his wife, but then going back to John, lingering.</p>
<p>Paul shuts the door, whiplashed. “What are you doing?”</p>
<p>John laughs, a cracking sound. “What am I doing? What are <em>you doing</em> you fucking bastard?!”</p>
<p>Paul pales, hands crawling over each other. “The old man then…”</p>
<p>“Like old Jack Kennedy,” John says, beating down the nerves in his stomach.</p>
<p>How must it be to hear that you’ve died two days ago? John watches the play of Paul’s face, the way it goes sick before finally settling on a strange acceptance that makes John pace away. “I thought you were supposed to be safe when you traveled?” John demands. “So how exactly… how could you…”</p>
<p>Paul looks at him, understanding creasing his brow. “John, luv.”</p>
<p>“No, no, no, don’t look at me like that, like it makes sense to you.” His eyes narrow, seeing guilt flash. “What haven’t you told me?”</p>
<p>“You’re shaking. Can we sit down?” Paul demonstrates, settling on the bland display couch and looking to John who remains standing erect like a rattlesnake.</p>
<p>“Tell me.”</p>
<p>Paul taps out two cigarettes, offering. John refuses to stray close enough to collect it. Paul lights the one, hand twisting the other as he says, “Most of my life is the same as anyone else’s, just spread out differently. I don’t actively try to change things because it just loops on itself. You’ve seen the bootstraps. I tell you we’re to be the Beatles at twelve. You rename the band that when we’re twenty and then at twenty-two I tell you that we’re the Beatles when you’re twelve. A paradox, aye? Time self-corrects this way. It’s why I go to safe places in the timeline, there’s nothing for me to really ruin, they’re <em>safe</em> physically and time-wise too, see?” John absorbs this information, nuances about tripping that he never asked and Paul never volunteered. It all makes sense, but dread looms over him like a shadow. What is Paul working up to?</p>
<p>“There is one exception.” Paul fidgets. “My mam… she told me that we have a free trip, just one. We can use it to go anywhere we want in the timeline no matter how unsafe. This trip is the only determinate thing I can do that won’t loop. When I do it, I rewrite the past the way you think I’m always doing.”</p>
<p>John’s head spins. He feels nauseous, the sudden aural memory of Paul’s dry hands rubbing and wringing in John’s childhood bedroom as he <em>bloody lied</em>. “You fucking hack,” John hisses. He deserved to know, holding half of this. He deserved to have a <em>say—</em></p>
<p>“Shut up, John. I couldn’t have told you. You’d have had me kill Julian before I was even twenty.” Paul puffs agitatedly as John’s stomach sinks and wretches. Acid flushes his mouth and his eyes feel too wide, stinging. Paul taps his smoke, says, “I was so tempted, so bloody tempted. I was worried about the band and us… but my first memory was of you as a da. You were so gentle. I couldn’t.”</p>
<p>John feels sick. “I—”</p>
<p>“I thought about using it when you and Yoko miscarried, too,” Paul says, brimming with all he’s never said. John gasps. Back then, he had the bloody thought himself, seeing Yoko’s scars, listening to the recording they’d made weeks before of their unborn’s heartbeat. Eerie and rabbit-like and pounding into his ears like little nails in little coffins. He thought suddenly <em>Paul could…</em> But no, the argument filtered back, and then John <em>did </em>throw up. As mad in his anguish as he was, he couldn’t stomach the way he could twist one of his children dead and the other alive with the same mouth. It was irreconcilable in himself. Only heroin and, later, Sean could quiet the dreadful self-knowledge.</p>
<p>“If you asked, I would have,” Paul says distantly, pulling John from the past. John shudders and then swallows the stomach acid and the reason he never asked. “But that isn’t why I travel, John. It isn’t to fix every wrong thing in your life, every tragedy. If it were, you’d be living with your mam and Freddie Lennon somewhere.”</p>
<p>“But you <em>did </em>use it like that, you pushed me outta the way and took four—” His lungs heave for a moment and only angry adrenaline forces him past <em>Paul’s death</em>. “You’re still having me on, you bastard.”</p>
<p>“I'm not, I'm along for the ride too. The thing is, son, you don’t understand time travel. You think you do, but you haven’t a clue about how it actually works.” Paul sighs. “It’s not like I get to change something and then remember what I’ve made <em>not</em> happen. Once I use my trip, history refolds to make it something that always happened. It changes everything that came before including my memory.”</p>
<p>John goggles. “What are you saying?”</p>
<p>Paul puts his palms together and then juts one off like a branch. “This is a bloody alternate timeline from one where you died, and then, many years down the line, I made my damn trip back to New York and shoved you well away from Mark bloody Chapman.”</p>
<p>“And you died,” John whispers.</p>
<p>John… John thought he knew how Paul’s traveling worked, he thought he could comprehend the impacts of undoing the past… in reality, the way time constricts and bends is too powerful for him to fathom, too immense. Paul sits and smokes like he couldn’t undo John himself if he had a mind to <em>like he didn’t remake him on a whim.</em> John feels fragile, his body shaking and jarring bones too close to the skin’s surface.</p>
<p>“So… so.” He’s blinking hard. “That old Paul used his trip to save me life.” Paul licks his lips, hesitates, and John towers over him. “What else is there? What <em>possibly</em>?”</p>
<p>“It’s not <em>that </em>Paul… It’s me. I have to trip back when I’m older and save your life or else the loop won’t close.”</p>
<p>John sways, hand reaching for the arm of the couch like it might stop him from falling apart in the wash of the knowledge. Sitting now, he gasps, his lungs feeling too small.</p>
<p>“Can’t you dodge?” John demands, ignoring his reedy, airless tone.</p>
<p>“That isn’t how it happened, is it? Make another bloody alternate universe. I probably wanted to be sure it worked. If you dodged he might’ve fired again,” Paul muses, guessing at his own bloody motives.</p>
<p>“You were always such a cryptic bastard as an old man.” John heaves air. “How’s it feel getting the runaround from yourself?”</p>
<p>“Breathe, John,” Paul says, still puffing at the other end of the couch, composed and perfectly closed off.</p>
<p>God, John can’t understand it, the ordered, calm way he’s always looked death in the face like it was happening in another country. John thought it was because of his tripping but even looking down the barrel at his own death elicits no grand swell. He doesn’t know what he wants from Paul, what he’s hoping to elicit, but his silence renders him too unknown, too unquantifiable. Just as he was at the end of their relationship, sending anonymous postcards and spinning out.</p>
<p>John’s discontent and nausea clear to make enough space for the bitterness that comes like a reflex. An ocean sits between them, their history, their feelings, their absence— death parted the tides for a moment, but John feels the wave curling up over him, uncertainty buffeting with stale emotions.</p>
<p>“And will you?” John asks.</p>
<p>“Oh, you haven’t changed at all,” Paul says, a cold growl among the smoke.</p>
<p>John snaps out, teeth flashing, “What Paul? What should I say? We don’t see each other, we hardly talk. What should I think? Is it yet another play for control from the great composer McCartney—”</p>
<p>“Fuck you, John. Fuck you! It may have been long for you, but never for me.” Paul shoots forward, coldness melted by ire smoldering as he stabs a finger at John. “Of course, I’ll save your bloody life!”</p>
<p>“Took the other one a while to decide,” John spits. He was so old, so <em>ancient </em>and frail in John shaking hands.</p>
<p>“Oh yeah, and if I’d done it five days after the shooting what then?” Paul demands and John pales as the implication sets in. “Yeah, tomorrow I’d have to walk into a bullet just to close the loop. Christ, John, can you forgive me for wanting a life for meself?”</p>
<p>So logical, so metered and planned. That old Paul must have realized and played a long game lasting decades. It’s disgusting, he wants to shake Paul until something real pops out, something reactive. “And if I do something horrible to you, what then? Gonna take another trip to Hamburg, eh?”</p>
<p>Paul flinches, ugliness starting to crawl over his face. “Like the last decade?” Paul asks. “Like every damn thing you’ve done to try and hurt me and Linda?” Paul jerks his head, jaw clenching.</p>
<p>“I’m still not composing with you.” The words fall out before he even thinks it through and a lovely red steals Paul’s skin.</p>
<p>“Fuck you, John. I wouldn’t bloody die for music. Nothing you write is worth that.”</p>
<p>John leans forward. “Isn’t it?”</p>
<p>Paul’s hand runs through his hair, eyes wide with disbelief. “I can’t… I don’t understand you. Did you want to die? You’ll have to pick a better method ‘cause I’ll not be assisting this suicide no matter what you say.”</p>
<p>In the past half hour, his own existence has felt so tremulous and unstable, and the blunt question startles him into applying the breaks. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, hurtling himself towards self-destruction again. “No,” he says quieter. The fact he doesn’t exist in an alternate universe is enough to make his insides rattle. His mouth feels dry, spinning out of his control in a way he doesn’t like. “I just… Why?” he rasps.</p>
<p>Paul sighs. “Come off it. You know why. Even if you’ve never let me say it.” Disgust twists Paul’s face. “You and your labels.”</p>
<p>John has suspicions and they feel heady and unreal even amid all this science fiction. “It wasn’t me what stopped you. I think it was because you thought you had all the time in the world, you thought you owned me.”</p>
<p>Paul flares up and then wilts. “I thought… I didn’t realize but I only visited you twice in your thirties. And the second time…” The memory plays over Paul’s eyes, older, more distant than for John who can still remember the way Paul’s greasy hair parted under his fingers. “It’s why I didn’t believe the band was breaking, because I knew that time was coming and you were… I <em>thought</em> you were so tender, so whatever was happening I thought we’d move past it and that you and I would always…” The words stutter and die in Paul’s mouth like a car-engine in winter.</p>
<p>“You moved on pretty quick for all that,” John says. It’s true, Linda is real, John remembers the sticky thump of his heart the first time he realized it. He’d been a right witch to Linda, for all that she stood for, for John’s utter replaceability. Paul wasn’t meant to make peace, he was supposed to suffer the way John did, not find happiness and a farm and eight dozen healthy children…</p>
<p>Paul picks the thoughts up right from his face, anger rushing back. “Should I have let you destroy me? You wanted to, and you almost did. If it weren’t for Linda. I don’t know why I ever thought I—" His teeth grit around the final word and John finds himself screaming for the release of it, hanging on the dangling end.</p>
<p>“What? Here’s your chance, Paul,” John pushes, mouth arid. “No one’s stopping you now, you coward.” Emotions climb up and down the ladder of Paul’s face before he settles on something helpless.</p>
<p>“Loved you, John. Love you.” His hand crawls to his face and he drags against the skin there. “God knows why.” He groans. “Except I do know why. I’ve known you forward and backward and fallen for you piecemeal all the while. Just last week I saw you and it still… You’re frustrating and stupid, but still the most beautiful soul I've ever met. How could I not…?”</p>
<p>Love you, die for you, John doesn’t know. He feels tremulous hope and disbelief filling his brain and ballooning it away. He fumbles over the couch, hands grabbing Paul’s head, turning him around to get a good proper look. A shiver chases down John’s spine sending his hair on end as he sees the same mix and swell of emotions as before, set in hazel instead of aged blue. The swirl doesn’t smear with death, instead, laying open like a gallery for John to peruse and he has to pull back in the face of so much evident sentiment.</p>
<p>Paul jerks his head away, tapping a snakeskin of ash in a tray before raising the cigarette to his lips. John eyes his profile, feeling his head spinning in the wake. Love. The word chases through the shadows lingering in Paul’s eyes within every memory, every hesitation, every time he drew too near to John, too close, and too hungry. It’s always been <em>that </em>complicating his expression. John… suspected, or maybe knew, but love is something that swallows him deeply in an overwhelming rush and then hours later feels sour and hideously embarrassing upon remembrance. Love is the shorthand he uses for other people when they ask him about Yoko, what it really means is that he wants her to love him but is never certain that she does. Love is the thing to stop wars, but it’s a general, undirected force that doesn’t touch or breach the barrier called <em>John. </em>But Paul is trying to tell him that he steps into four bullets for love.</p>
<p>Paul, who loves life in its minutiae, taking death. For John.</p>
<p>This is his reward for rocking the boat, but now having it, John hasn’t a clue what to do. Paul reads his face and sighs.</p>
<p>There’s a soft crush of cigarette grinding in the tray as Paul stands up. “Whatever, John. You'll live to a ripe old age and still be a right bastard. I hope you’re happy.” He doesn’t glance back as he heads towards the door.</p>
<p>There aren’t words, or if they are, John can’t find them, but his heart pulses with a dread certainty that once Paul passes the lintel, this moment will evaporate. He lurches forward, feet trampling over children’s books and landing hard on a toy truck.</p>
<p>“Bloody—ow! Just, just wait. Come on, Paul.” Paul stops, hand hovering above the knob. He looks down at Sean’s wicked wooden truck and John follows his eyes. There are words for this. “I’m… I’m really grateful. I get to see Sean grow up. I don’t have to leave him fatherless like me own da did me. And Julian too, I’m going to work on that. I’m not going to waste this chance to fix things right between us.”</p>
<p>“That’s good,” Paul murmurs. He still won’t meet eyes, so John hobbles closer.</p>
<p>“I don’t want to throw away this chance either,” John says.</p>
<p>Paul turns and leans against the door, staring at the wall. “We patched things up, you and I. We don’t owe the other anything as far as I see it.” He sighs, then softer, “You don’t owe me, John, you really don’t. That’s not why I…”</p>
<p>Licking his lips, John utters, “Think I owe meself, actually.” Paul lifts his gaze now, meets John’s with the force of its attention. “Think I owe it to try and figure out how we lost what we did… if we can get it back.” The past four days he’s been shaking with his need for Paul… even longer if he’s being honest. He’s craved and hesitated even longer. This game between them, this not-speaking and hesitating over phone cords can’t happen. Not when Paul’s admission feels like momentum that John plans on riding.</p>
<p>“We can’t get back,” Paul shakes his head, resolute. “No, we’ve done this before in your Lost Weekend. You think you want something, but it’s only for as long as it’s good.” He shudders under John’s touch, light at the elbow, fingers wrapping around the crease of muscle and bone.</p>
<p>John doesn’t remember. He swallows it back. “I know that I don’t have enough now. I’ve been feeling it, even with Yoko and Sean and the rest… I’ve been getting back in the studio, searching for <em>something</em>.” He presses the word at Paul who shakes his head.</p>
<p>“I’m not it. We’ve said and done too much. One bad fight and it's off again,” Paul says.</p>
<p>“When?” John demands, thumb stroking. “Are you talking now, or things I have said, things I will? That’s the thing with us, Paul, we think we’re on the same page but the books out of order. I think… I think we have to take the pages out of its binding and lay them all out.” He steps closer. “Looking at it this way, it’s a good book, isn’t it? Us together.”</p>
<p>“Basing it off the future only ever made me look like a fool,” Paul snips. “Holding on to a band and a relationship that you were trying to break,” Paul says, anger tensing the tendon in John’s grip. “Let’s not forget, you’ve been running from me!” The depressed Paul in the gardens, the thirty-something Paul smoking cigarettes and trying not to meet eyes. For the first time, John can parse their existence, gain insight into his absence in Paul’s life. John was only trying to escape, but Paul’s never been granted that privilege, haunted by the ghosts of Christmas past and future knowing he wasn’t welcome in the present.</p>
<p>John tries to explain, tries to put into words why he broke them the way he did.</p>
<p>“I needed a wall with all the pressure. It was killing me, Paul. More than that, I wanted privacy and to pick me own destiny.” A brittle laugh cracks out at that. “Look where I’ve landed with that. But the thing is, once I drew up the wall I couldn’t take it down for you anymore. Even when I wanted too. It was like suddenly I didn’t know what was in your brain; if you liked me if you hated me— when I stopped peeking into the future I didn’t know and the even playing field scared me.” Paul’s listening now, eyes dark but focused. The truth is, he thought Paul wouldn’t take him back since picking up his own life, and the crippling embarrassment of his rejection would have undone John, simply unraveled the fragile core of him. “I was scared. But hearing that you feel the same way—”</p>
<p>“You’re only saying this because I save your life.” Paul shakes his head. “You don’t have to John. You don’t need to pander…”</p>
<p>“Bloody listen to me! I looked for you at Madison Square Gardens, I looked for you because I wanted to see you more than anyone in that 50 thousand crowd. And when I saw you with Sean, I was glad… And when you came to the apartment I was glad then too.” John had <em>ached </em>for him.</p>
<p>His words are gaining traction, working through Paul’s mind, but there’s doubt there. Clinging, stubborn doubt from ten years of rethinking and reimagining how and why he ruined the only sure thing in his life. Paul pushes back and challenges, “Which time?” John raises a brow. Vinegar rises to his lips quicker with Paul and he has to swallow it back, try to force the wall down. Paul had already been vulnerable and John has to match it or surrender.</p>
<p>John steps closer, whispers, “I was old enough to let you go. Enough time passed from our breakup to then. If I’d really wanted to, I could have ignored you. I could have let you go… but I wanted you. Paul, the wanting never stops.”</p>
<p>He sees the barrier start cracking, hope beginning to edge Paul’s expression. “John…”</p>
<p>“We’re both different, our lives are different. So much fuller.” His grip travels up to cradle Paul’s face, a clean fit. “You’ve opened up a whole new timeline for us and, Christ, I dunno what it all means, but I know what I want it to be about. Love, Paul.”</p>
<p>Paul’s eyelids shutter closer, wetness pearling along the rims. “You’ll change your mind, John, you always do with Yoko, you’ll change it… We’ve done this too many times.”</p>
<p>John lets his nose bump against Paul’s neck. “Let’s do it again. I can’t bear not to. Not when you…”</p>
<p>Eyes open, ringed damply. Paul finishes it for him, “Love you? I’ve always done that, John… But now you believe me,” Paul realizes.</p>
<p>“Bloke walks into four bullets,” John says, feeling foolish. Bloke rewrites history. Cynthia always said he was a devil to convince.</p>
<p>“Is that all it takes?” Paul asks, helpless laughter creaking through his chest. He’s close enough that John can feel the vibrations and sense the air kicking out and in of healthy lungs and he buries himself closer into Paul. The tension in Paul relaxes, easing off and letting his body incrementally unfold to John the way it used to.</p>
<p>Paul soaks in John, his good faith, his desire to start anew, and his lips tilt forward. John meets them halfway, prying the kiss open with desperate relief. The way he kisses is still all Paul, consuming and coy, but now tempered by a life of contentment edged by gentle loss. John writhes beneath Paul’s hands which map out the slender bend of him. No one else can make John feel well-shaped like his body is just the right mix of corners and knobby bones, but the way Paul’s hands chase him lavishes ardor that feels earned. John can believe he’s good for the time he’s possessed by Paul. John lets his own grasp wander, taking in the softer stomach, the flexible swimmer’s muscle. The slight bulge in Paul’s pants causes him to linger, hand cupping.</p>
<p>Paul startles back then. “John.”</p>
<p>John keeps stroking the top, nurturing it into growing pronounced. “John we can’t do this, with Yoko and Linda in the other room. Think about Sean and my kids in the hotel—”</p>
<p>John raises a brow. “What we have isn’t to do with them.” It’s true. What they have has always been outside of monogamy. It’s why he never told Yoko a thing about Paul or his abilities. Paul’s understood that too, the way he carried on with John and Jane and John and Francie, unless… “You don’t want this anymore?” John might’ve figured. Paul has his own life now, his lovely Linda, no need for his forty-year-old skeleton of a mate. He must have misunderstood the <em>love </em>that Paul spoke about. Embarrassing. He’s embarrassed himself horribly.</p>
<p>John jerks away, or tries to, but Paul’s made a cage with his arms, hand on either side of John’s waist. Thumbs trace the lines of John’s hipbones and the shuddered sound Paul makes is enough to make John look at him again. “It’s not you John, it’s just…” Doubt, still circling the sink of Paul’s expression. He may use the women and children as an excuse, but he’s still only trying to cover himself.</p>
<p>John growls, irritated now with himself and Paul. “Come on, Paul, this isn’t the last time. I’m not… I’m not getting you in just because. I won’t leave you alone again unless you’re being a fucking pillock.” His hips snap forward leveraging his prick against Paul’s and earns a hiss. “I don’t know what we’ll do about the women, but we’ll work it out so we can keep each other too. God, but this’ll only work if we both want it.”</p>
<p>“I want it,” Paul whispers, hips canting and raising a flush to his face. “You don’t have to though.”</p>
<p>“I want to.” John presses him against the wall, relishes Paul’s teeth biting his lip and the hand touching John like a buried treasure lost and found.</p>
<p>“It’s been so long, John. You’re still… God, it’s crazy what you do to me.”</p>
<p>The words curl hot in John’s chest and he jerks himself harder into Paul. “Christ, when was the last time we fucked the right way around?”</p>
<p>“Ngh… The Maharishi’s private camp,” Paul answers, fingers tracing down John’s long abdomen to rest over the lip of jeans. He’s waiting for permission, so John slips his own hand over Paul’s pants button.</p>
<p>“Brilliant having all that oil lying around,” John muses, working it undone.</p>
<p>“I wasn’t much for your insomniac phase,” Paul grumbles, but the sound jerks into a soft grunt as John touches him skin to skin after ten years. Paul is quick to return the favor. Paul’s hand feels different, harder from age or life on the farm. The changes make John shake for him, unspooling marvelously from his care.</p>
<p>It’s like the first again, jerking each other off. This time though, there’s no shy aversion of eyes, no denial waiting to fire from their lips. Now, John leans the top of his forehead into Paul’s and they watch and consume each other’s every flicker of emotion. Desire, embarrassment, pleasure, and wonder curl and bend Paul’s eyebrows and crinkling forehead. John aches for finally being literate again, making sense of this daft face.</p>
<p>Teasing, John sticks out his tongue, accidentally brushing wet against Paul’s nose and earns a laugh. Love shoots over Paul’s eyes, desperate, helpless love. John curls his fingers, knowing his eyes are leaking emotions of their own and Paul returns it two-fold in a snake-eating trail of emotional feedback. Paul’s eyelashes tremble, his jaw twitches and falls open and then he spills himself over John’s hand, shaking and jerking in the aftermath and John is undone. He washes up on the shores of orgasm, wet and gasping. Amid the sticky mess, Paul strokes just a beat too long, edging the line between pain and pleasure and John sighs. Some things haven’t changed… but enough has.</p>
<p>John claims Paul’s wet, relaxed mouth in a kiss. “There we are, love. There we are.”</p>
<p>Paul withdraws, eyes skating the mussed mess of him. “God help me, but I do. I love you, John Lennon.”</p>
<p>John steals another kiss. “I look forward to it.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>John and Paul start something that is neither more nor less than love.</p>
<p>They tell their wives. Linda, blinking hard, asks that they keep it away from the family, booking hotels or taking vacations. There’s something about the weary frown curling her mouth that tells John this isn’t a complete surprise. It fills him with such intense relief and guilt that he can barely look at her for months.</p>
<p>“Does she know? Did you already tell her?” John asks, stretching his legs in over-washed hotel sheets.</p>
<p>“Which part?” Paul wonders, head nestled in the pillow. “How I feel for you? It’s always been something of an open secret.”</p>
<p>“Not to me,” John says.</p>
<p>“Aye, you’re a bit thick, son.” He bats away the pillow John launches, giggles.</p>
<p>Going grey and still giggling, what a madman, John thinks. “And the rest?”</p>
<p>Paul’s eyes take a shy cant John hasn’t seen in years. “For tripping, well, I’ve never known how to tell anyone,” Paul admits to John’s honest shock.</p>
<p>“Come off it.”</p>
<p>Paul curls closer. “No, really. Didn’t have to tell me family, and you, well, that didn’t go very well, but you had proof no one else got.”</p>
<p>“And the girl when you were eight,” John says, remembering suddenly. “What happened to her? Dropped off in a void?”</p>
<p>Paul laughs. “Hardly. She didn’t believe me. I tried to prove it to her, but I was concentrating so hard on making her shut up that I didn’t leave for a week.” He sighs, reaching for a cigarette. “I keep thinking Linda will notice, but a farm is a big place and she’s a little dreamy for all her practicality. She always thinks I’m on a walk or I have the canniest ways of secreting meself away. I just never know how to actually say it.”</p>
<p>“I thought… Mary’s your firstborn, right? Shouldn’t she be…” John waves his hand. He often thought about her through the years, wondering if she had the same daft adventures with someone, hoping in passing it was a bloke she was paired with to save her Paul’s troubles.</p>
<p>Paul’s lips twitch around the filter. “Remember that, do you? Well, it only passes when the relationship is between the tripper and—"</p>
<p>“The time-traveler’s queer,” John finishes. “You knew all the time then that you’d end the line.”</p>
<p>Eyelids dropping and a smile curving, Paul says, “Aye, not that there was a choice, but you were worth ending it John, I’ve always thought so.”</p>
<p>Yoko receives the news in her eerie, still way. John admires and envies the mastery she has over her emotions, letting them rule and wrack her only for the sake of art but never (rarely, he corrects, remembering bloody concrete) for other people. She says nothing at the time, absorbing. Later she crawls into bed with him.</p>
<p>“He loves her John,” she tells him. “And you love me.”</p>
<p><em>He loves me,</em> John thinks but doesn’t say. Somehow if he gave her the words they would go off in her mouth like a gun, and he guards it as the only secret between them. …And, if he utters them aloud he fears the sharp certainty of his voice will shatter her fine skin. Certainty is not what John and Yoko have, for all that their emotion is exceptional.</p>
<p>She sighs and forgiveness chases her exhale. She thinks it’s a phase, that he’ll forget his new life plans when the disappointment of real-life and other people sinks in again.</p>
<p>Consequently, she is candy sweet to him at first, cooing and cradling. Life nearly lost casts a rosy tint to their relationship and she can even forgive his affair. Over time, it fades as the veil of a grieving grateful wife becomes limiting to someone so artistic and barely-reigned like Yoko. They sweep along each other, squalling and falling in and out again like before. The difference is that John has somewhere warm to wait out the storm, someone else’s arms to hold him against the temptest and it adds a level of unexpected leverage to his life. He reclaims stability in their fights, no longer risking his anchor to sanity with every capsizing wave. She can’t keep him burning and aching for her body anymore when Paul loves as sweet as seventeen again.</p>
<p>Shrugging off her moods is easier when she isn’t the only good thing in his life. It lessens the codependency and makes what shifts between them less potent. Occasionally, John is tempted to fall back into the gaping maw of her possession, of being unJohn again, but he’s learned that Paul would probably forgive him that and more and it hurts so sweet he winds up calling Paul in the wee hours of the morning so besotted he can barely speak, letting his lover hush him and whisper about sheep and lyrics he heard that reminded him of John. He could hurt Paul again and still have it all, and for that reason, he tries not to.</p>
<p>Life goes on. Yoko watches and waits for him to move on from Paul (again) and John keeps wary for the weapons she keeps tucked in that fine brain of hers.</p>
<p>Sean sits between them, both a connection of their love and a tool against it.</p>
<p>“I’m not sure it’s the right environment,” she says one day at breakfast, apropos of nothing. John knows she has a suitcase packed, has noticed some of Sean’s toys missing.</p>
<p>“I think we do all right,” John muses over the newspaper. “Helen’s a big help and it’s great that Sean gets to spend time with both of us while we work.”</p>
<p>“It’s true, nothing can replace Mother’s love.” Her eyes are calm for all the sharp edges lining her comment. He hasn’t called her Mother since the shooting. John’s hair feels like it stands on end, gravitates towards the ceiling. She’s wearing her usual dark clothes, but he imagines the way her sleeves might pull away and reveal his fingerprints if he feeds the anger crawling in his stomach.</p>
<p>He bares his teeth, forcing his hands under his thighs to keep them shapeless. “Did you see the latest court updates?” John asks. “Paul’s giving EMI the runaround. Hasn’t lost a court case yet, the canny bastard.”</p>
<p>Her beautiful eyes narrow, sharp like cut gems. Oh, she could have Sean if she exposed John and Paul’s dalliance, but it would come at the cost of her funding, her public image, and her pride. Her eyes glitter and for a moment John thinks of her nails as more than pretty lines, but the tension fades.</p>
<p>Sean’s truck appears in the toy box the next week and they get back to whatever messed up normalcy they’ve claimed between them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Every temperate day, John goes for a walk in Central Park. Yoko tells him to wait, wanting to read the I Ching and the movements of the spheres, but John shakes his head already halfway through the door. John has his own fortune-teller, and Paul groans about meeting John as an old bastard and it makes him cackle with delight. There’s still danger and pain in the world, but not death (not yet).</p>
<p>Along his meandering stroll, John runs into Paul— at seven, babbling about being in AMERICA and the wild west books he’s been reading and playing cowboys and does John go to the cinema because then he’d know why it’s so cool. John grins and pats his dark head and says science-fiction is far cooler.</p>
<p>Paul, fifteen now and squinting up at him. He’s met this bloke who looks like John and is called John, but he doesn’t wear glasses and what is John’s last name anyway? A secret? Well, can he see the glasses, then?</p>
<p>“Only if you can reach them, son.”</p>
<p>Paul, a sweating heaving mess of tan overcoat, blinking wildly up at the trees. “I was just… Shea, you know?”</p>
<p>John has to put an arm against a tree as he laughs and laughs, remembering Brian’s utter shock when he went to empty the Well’s Fargo van only to find the last Beatle <em>in absentia. </em></p>
<p>“Brian must be up the bloody wall,” Paul complains, not noticing the gold and red foliage and twigs John sneaks under his collar and sleeves for his younger self to find upon unwrapping. In that vein, Paul leans for a kiss, something testing. His pupils are blown from the performance and yet knees ready to run. Fishing again, always trying to keep the upper hand knowledge-wise. John only smiles mysteriously and puts a maple leaf to his forehead.</p>
<p>Paul takes his turn for vagaries at seventy-something, still suited up, hair puffy and over-stylish.</p>
<p>“And thus, JimJanJohn Lennon turned the tides and won the war,” John performs, peeking under his curling hair for a hint. He earns a chuckle, pale breath pushing from warm cheeks. Seeing him old and thriving makes John’s feral chest settle. It doesn’t stop his eyes from trying to calculate his age. Seventy? Maybe eighty?</p>
<p>“You never do know, John.” Paul winks.</p>
<p>He’s gone.</p>
<p>John walks back to the Dakota, trying to imagine living double the time he already has. For a moment the drag of time feels a wretched thing, but then, he supposes it wouldn’t be that bad, with Paul and the kids. Boring maybe, domestic and filled with granny music, but not bad.</p>
<p>Before, John looked forward to the visits to know Paul’s mind or to glimpse into the future. They were thrilling, tantalizing and often sexual. He hasn’t fiddled with his mate out of order and doesn’t think he will. It’s his Paul he wants, not anything before or after. He’s waited too long to possess the present one entirely. Love is what happens when you’re busy chasing ghosts… The traveling becomes instead a pleasant surprise to tide him over when their rendezvouses are still weeks away. He likes seeing his lover in an unmolded state, marveling at the way he’s spun into such a sculpture of complexity. He wants to see it happen in real-time, wants to sit old with Paul somewhere with fewer stairs and unconsciously starts picturing that future before him.</p>
<p>Whenever he returns from his encounters with Paul, he can’t smother his good mood or the drum of his fingers on the table, searching for a beat. Yoko observes him, and he feels that she somehow knows he’s seen Paul and yet remains unable to explain it to herself when newspaper articles boast of his presence overseas. John kisses her head and goes to the other room to call Paul.</p>
<p>“I’ve just seen a face,” John says when the line picks up. He leans into Paul’s soft exhale on the other line.</p>
<p>“Not too daft-looking I hope.”</p>
<p>“The daftest yet,” John promises.</p>
<p>“So, I’ve that to look forward to. Say anything interesting?”</p>
<p>“Wait your turn,” John says, grinning. He’s glad he can give Paul fair weather days in Central Park. The pause on the phone lingers too long. “Seen me then?” John likes to think the worst is behind them, but he always worries about future assholery, doesn’t want to put it on Paul and ruin his day. John knows better than anyone the way he swings.</p>
<p>“It was Julia,” Paul says, and the day rushes back to John, grainy, like through a sieve. The ache is still there, distant but tender, floating around like her red hair. “You look like her, you know. Especially now,” Paul says, somehow finding the right thing. The words are pleasant along John’s ear and he tugs his curling hair with a gentler hand.</p>
<p>“We’re almost the same age,” John realizes. Then he’s blown back for a moment by a second realization; he almost was mowed down before her too. He goes to the door, stretching the cord and peeks out to see Sean lit florescent by the tv screen, giggling at high-pitched cartoons. His hair’s grown lately, skirting the edges of his collar and John loves wiping it away, earning grunts and complaints. Sean is becoming independent, flourishing so keenly.</p>
<p>His son never had to face what John did, and the gratitude for Paul wells up in a geyser. The emotion tangles somewhere along the wire and what passes his lips is, “You know, you don’t have to do it.”</p>
<p>Paul sighs, soft, indulgent. “I’ve already done it, you know that, Johnny.”</p>
<p>“Never too late to see if you can make a paradox of a paradox,” John says, worrying the coiled cord.</p>
<p>“Life without you would be such a drag, don’t you think?” He can hear the smile, sense the gleam in Paul’s eyes. It still bothers John though, the thought of nonexistence.</p>
<p>“Was it a drag for him, you think? The other Paul?” John thinks about old Paul passing through his nightmares. Placid face, stylish clothes.</p>
<p>“Don’t know how he did it,” Paul says, muted.</p>
<p>“Did it once, didn’t you? Seemed like you were alright with Linda,” John replies, trying and failing to keep the convoluted accusation from his tone. He doesn’t intend anything, but it’s too sharp anyway.</p>
<p>Paul catches his momentum and dispels it with a long pause. “I almost didn’t. Almost became another casualty of the rock and roll lifestyle.” John looks to his hand, mildly chastised but moreso wishing it were somewhere near Paul’s body to touch. “Besides, back then and I’m sure in the other universe, you were never truly gone. In fact, I imagine he met you often, even after.”</p>
<p>“In <em>dreams</em>,” John whispers. Like Paul’s mother… It sends a shiver up his spine to have been carried through the decades by that Paul, to’ve been loved even in his crueler months where no redemption was earned between them. Somehow, even those paltry years were enough for him to risk it all.</p>
<p>“I do enjoy when people visit me in dreams…” Paul’s voice is laced and teeming. Love. It shudders through John. “You’ll always be my favorite visitor, John.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Things aren’t perfect. John is still the push and pull of tides drawing him taut around emptiness. Having more in his life helps, but it isn’t a cure for existing. Paul is still domestically pedestrian and his ego runs away with him at times, his accidental assumptions that people naturally want to fall in with his merrymaking. It doesn’t help that the whole world is just gasping to say yes to him. John tells him such one night. His mouth’s been bitter all week though Paul pretends it isn’t. They haven’t made love today and John doesn’t think they will with how on edge he feels. He taps a cigarette on the ashtray in their latest run of love-nest apartments. This one is in Albany and the excess of trees depresses John for reasons he can’t articulate.</p>
<p>Paul responds at length. “Most people are too coward to tell a Be-AT-le no,” Paul says from his place in the other chair. Arrow whines, resting her furry head in Paul’s lap to scratch. “You must experience it too.”</p>
<p>“I’ve meself for that, haven’t I?” John inhales smoke. “And Yoko. Not you though.”</p>
<p>“We used to tell each other no.”</p>
<p>“We did do.” John remembers when it was his job, he was the only one who could get Paul to slow down and listen to reason. Even George Martin would get swept away by his mad drive, his persistence for always one more take.</p>
<p>Paul hums mildly, as though he’s never been some kind of hell-bent visionary intent on creating only the song in his head and nothing less occasionally regardless of the costs. “I miss it sometimes, your honesty.”</p>
<p>“Wax on your sweaters, shall I?” John muses, legs curling into the couch with him.</p>
<p>“I was thinking… If I ever rang you up with a little bit of a song…”</p>
<p>John can’t help the swell of anger that billows through his chest. It had to be bloody today, didn’t it? “Should I call up Ringo too then? Get George to have Neil drive him down. How long have you been waiting to ask?” Suspicion curls and wisps through his mind. Was this Paul’s plan all along? Satisfy him sexually to ingratiate himself for some kind of reunion. It seems possible, Yoko’s always said Paul was too clever and John’s seen it first hand, the way people dance for him. She’s always said that <em>need</em> is the only language John understands and what if Paul knows it too?</p>
<p>“Christ, I’m not asking for a damn reunion!” Paul exclaims, shooting up. Arrow yaps in excitement, paws clicking over the wood as she darts between them.</p>
<p>John feels a headache coming on. “Aye, whatever it is you can take it and piss off. I don’t want to compose with you. I like doing me own thing. I don’t want to go back to all the ‘he said, she said’ of the golden years.”</p>
<p>“Cause what you’re doing now is so much better,” Paul sneers. Anger snaps through John’s mouth. His relationship with music isn’t the effortless symbiosis Paul has always ferried like a train charging blindly on its track. John’s is an angry lover who knocks him down and takes more than gives, but he doesn’t have to justify himself.</p>
<p>“It hasn’t got you in it, and it’s that much better for it.”</p>
<p>Paul’s mouth thins, his hands tense white under his recent tan. Whatever words on his tongue are interrupted as Arrow yaps and jumps about, thrown into paroxysms from the atmosphere. Paul squats down, trying to calm her. He shifts his intent, pained gaze away and John tries to step back mentally. His body is ramrod, doing that fierce leaning thing that happens when he’s too worked up and John consciously tries to unbend.</p>
<p>“I wasn’t asking to compose with you,” Paul says after a pause, hand anchored in Arrow’s scraggly mane.</p>
<p>“No?” John challenges.</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“But you want to.” He regrets letting the words out the minute he sees Paul’s composure slip and rawness takes his face.</p>
<p>“Well yeah! We’re so good together. It’s amazing what we did, <em>still </em>could do if you stopped worrying about the press and overthinking it.” Feverishness caresses his tone, the sweet swirling excitement that charmed the press and every producer. John was enraptured by it too, at one point, but the line blurred, became entrapment and obligation instead. His shoulders crane together and he feels his muscles tense as if to run back to New York City. When John finally meets eyes with Paul again, he finds something lonely and drawn there. Paul flips it into a smile, struggling for some levity. “Sorry, guess you're right. I'm not used to people saying no. Even when I ask for it.”</p>
<p>John lets the words buffer against him for a moment before accepting them. It isn't <em>never</em> that he means, but he can't even tell Paul that without giving him that gleam. This just isn't a topic he's ready to breach yet. John sighs, pressing out the smolder of his cigarette. Christ, they’ve always been a bit mad when it comes to music. It’s just who they are, he supposes, what other people made them sticking their names together. They’ve always been composers in their own right, not that anyone knows.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry about what I said before, about your recording…” Paul gestures vaguely. It amuses John, his and Linda's by-the-book approach to relationships with the actual apologies and remorse. He hasn’t a clue of the intense, passive-aggressive mind games that John navigates and indulges in at home.</p>
<p>John plays by Paul’s rules now. “Aye, me too.” He leans into the couch, slack again, extends his own olive branch. “What did you mean if not composing?”</p>
<p>“Just, would it be alright if I shared a song with you now and again. I miss sharing music with you. Tell me your thoughts and the like, if you have any.” Paul gives Arrow a few pats before joining John on the couch only for the dog to clamber atop both of them.</p>
<p>“Christ,” John mutters, face full of sheepdog. Having <em>thoughts </em>about Paul and his music has never been the problem, but the slant to them… “And what if I think it’s rubbish? What do we do then?” They’ve something at stake in this now, a relationship that John rather enjoys. John’s not sure he wants to put it at the mercy of Paul’s musical ego. Paul sees the play of emotions and understands the stakes too well.</p>
<p>A gentle quirk of his lips, genuine. “Everything you say is rubbish John, but I listen to it all anyway.” Something soft settles between them. It’s the nearest either of them have come to acknowledging the rabid way they’ve kept up with each other’s output and the recognition soothes some distant insecurity in John’s chest. Paul’s shoulder brushes into him and John links their hands at their thighs, brushing against Arrow’s fur.</p>
<p>“You’re welcome to call up for free rubbish at any time then,” John allows.</p>
<p>“Only yours, Johnny.” Paul grins wide. “To hell with the critics.”</p>
<p>“Aye fuck ‘em. Just premium trash for you, Macca.”</p>
<p>Paul leans into him, gratitude painting the lips that chase his own. John's starting to rethink his previous stance about a sexless Sunday when he accidentally leans back too far and knocks his elbow into the table. The ashtray shakes off and clatters to the floor, ash scatters into the air, Arrow barks and sneezes, Paul startles and—</p>
<p>Vanishes.</p>
<p>Arrow, suddenly unsupported, somersaults backward and lands on the floor in a frenzy of snuffling and anxious trotting. John sneezes, looking at the mess and the ash-coated dog. Mercury must be in retrograde, or whatever.</p>
<p>He rolls a joint to wait it out.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>John groans as he uncurls from his chair, one protesting bone at a time. His hands go to the bridge between his eyes. Christ, but reading didn’t use to be so hard. He sets down the book and levers himself up with some effort. Paul’s off doing some daft thing for his latest oratorio, or sommat and John was pleased to stay home and soak in the heat from the radiator and reread some Flannery O’Connor.</p>
<p>He’s thinking of tea when shoes land and there’s a long sigh as someone flops over the sofa. John peeks behind him and finds Paul, young and freshly washed, digging his head into the cushions.</p>
<p>“Just wanted a kip,” he moans, muffled. “Why now?”</p>
<p>John’s lips tick up. “I thought sleeping was easy.”</p>
<p>Paul’s eyes dart to him, widening as they see the aged landscape of his face. “God, is that you John? You’re so…”</p>
<p>John wrenches his face into a scowl. “Best think about the end of that sentence, son.” Paul’s genuine shock makes his lips tremble, and soon John is cackling.</p>
<p>Paul groans, putting the pillow over his head. “I’m too knackered for your teasing, old man. We’ve been touring non-stop for I dunno how long.”</p>
<p>“I do know,” John says. “This is a month in the future, see what it’s done to me?”</p>
<p>Paul grumbles, stretching over the cushions, feet dangling off the top. “Still think you’re funny.”</p>
<p>“Still prissy, Paulie.” John watches the young man fidget and twist in the cushions. Beatlemania, from John’s memory. Still young and unaware of the hard lessons and cruel twists before him, the way he and John spiral and crash into each other, trying to damage one another before realizing hurting one hurts the other.</p>
<p>He doesn’t know the years after their reunion where Linda died, and Yoko searched for something more potent than John bloody Lennon. In the wreckage, John and Paul found each other permanently. The papers were agog when they move in together. The children were flustered and suspicious, especially Heather who went off to America to be with her biological father for a time. It was rough and sometimes they were the only thing keeping the other going.</p>
<p>“If it had been Linda you followed, you could have caught the cancer,” John whispered. It was selfish, and Paul keened, aching and soft in his neck. John had been dogging his presence, following him to bed and keeping their hands laced in case Paul didn’t see the point in a world without Linda and dropped into New York…</p>
<p>“It was always going to be a world without one or the other of you,” Paul said, bloodshot eyes. “Even a time-traveler hasn’t got it all.”</p>
<p>This Paul’s not lived any of that, the hardship… and the love. John grins. He has no idea the way that John come together to such a point that they share this daft apartment together openly with their children and grandchildren coming around to indulge the elderly. John never gives them his song-rights so the joke’s on them…</p>
<p>The twenty-year-old on the couch can’t fathom how good-and-bad life’s been to them. Christ, John’s getting sentimental in his archaism. “Hows about I sing you to sleep then?” John offers. “Me throat makes the most interesting rattling sound.”</p>
<p>Paul grunts and John sighs. No respect. The dark bruises beneath Paul’s eyes nag at him, so, slowly, John navigates to the little upright piano against the wall. The first chords of <em>Roll Over Beethoven </em>have Paul snickering into his pillow, and John slides smoothly into the hits he remembers of that time, playing <em>If I Fell</em> until Paul’s breathing goes deep and even. He patters though <em>And I Love Her</em> and trails over the chords of <em>Yesterday </em>with some fondness, remembering the daft way Paul’d stumbled from bed with the melody—</p>
<p>John slams on the keys and jerks his head around only to find the couch empty. “Of bloody course.” He stamps to the kitchen for his tea and a spliff. Paul enters the apartment halfway through his cup.</p>
<p>“Hullo, Johnny.” He smiles, eyes merry and coy beneath his grey hair. “Any for me?”</p>
<p>“Not after what you’ve done,” John snips, taking a hit.</p>
<p>“What did I do?” Paul asks, pouring himself a cup from the kettle. “Because whatever it is, it has nothing on what you did to me.” He settles at their two-person table and gives John a cross look, plucking the joint right from his hands. “You were so rude, John, called me old and said I couldn’t wet knickers in a church choir.”</p>
<p>“We both know better, of course.” John rolls his eyes, faffing his hair mockingly. Paul tosses a sugar cube at him and John pops it right in his mouth, savoring it dissolution into sweetness. “That’s nothing. You stole <em>Yesterday</em> right from under me fingers! I played it as a lullaby and the next thing I know it’s on our record past.”</p>
<p>Paul squints over his teacup. “Did it happen that way? I can’t remember.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I’m sure.” John rolls his eyes, snagging the joint back. “It’s no wonder you kept asking me if it were one of mine.”</p>
<p>Paul’s eyes dance. “Well, you know, Johnny, you learned it from me first.”</p>
<p>“And you learned it from me first too. We’re both telling the truth,” John says and a smile cracks his lips. “Bootstraps everywhere.”</p>
<p>“They ought to call it the Lennon paradox,” Paul says sagely.</p>
<p>“Some bloke named Bootstrap got there first, and that’s commendable,” John rejoins, puffing. “I’m happy enough having me name on the writing credit.”</p>
<p>Paul meets his toothy grin with a raised brow. “Well, I suppose you’ve been doing wrong not performing <em>Yesterday </em>for every fan what asks. It’s a bloody John-song too.” He laughs merrily at the disgust twisting John’s cheeks and John soon folds over into warmth too. That Paul may have <em>Yesterday </em>but he hasn’t an idea about the future.</p>
<p>They sip tea, mellowing with the weed. Paul’s mood settles and his eyes press into John’s with a degree of weight. “Do you ever think about what your life would be like without the tripping?”</p>
<p>The question startles John. “Christ, but you’ve waited to ask.” He mulls it over. He thinks about his childhood, the anxious certainty that something was wrong with him for all the strangeness he saw… but then, he’d known before Paul that he was different. His writings and his drawings always peeled back the veneer to show the not-alrightness resting below, his fear of his own disposability and his whimsical thoughts. “I suppose we would have still met at the fete, right? You would have still begged and pleaded—”</p>
<p>“Knocked your socks off, you mean,” Paul corrects. “Did your guitar up better than you ever had.”</p>
<p>“—To get in me band,” John finishes. “We’d still have made music, right?”</p>
<p>“I think so,” Paul says. “Not sure what I would have done if not that.”</p>
<p>“Become a teacher,” John quips.</p>
<p>“And you an artist, I suppose. Maybe gone to Hamburg with Stu. I think he would have found Astrid one way or another.”</p>
<p>“I’d be in prison,” John grins. “Lucky for me we were bound to meet regardless. The Beatles would have lived, though maybe not with the name considering where that came from.”</p>
<p>“Still don’t know why you called it a pie,” Paul grumbles.</p>
<p>John pursues the line of logic. “Who knows, we could have made it as Johnny and the Moondogs. Without <em>Yesterday,</em> if the world could manage its absence.” It’s amusing to think of the legacy that would have left behind. Somehow he thinks the band would have unraveled sooner if he had his own name front and center. It was always a communal effort, their success.</p>
<p>“Do you think we’d still have us?” Paul asks. There’s a vulnerability unfolding in his eyes that he tries to mask by taking the joint back.</p>
<p>“What’s all this then, hm?” John asks, moving his knee to slide against Paul as if to read his tremors like a seismograph.</p>
<p>“I just wondered… I’ve been worrying lately, getting a bit in me head I suppose about how I’ve impacted things, if I’ve manipulated events to my advantage.” His face casts down. “Things have ended up a bit all right for me, things considered.” He’s somewhat right. It isn't perfect, but they have something intense, loving, and good, maybe even preternaturally so. Even still…</p>
<p>John’s ankle hooks around Paul’s foot, dragging their chairs closer and startling Paul into eye-contact. “You know, I’ve never thought it. Not even at my worst.” It’s true too. “Because I knew what a stumbling mad mess you are, oh, everyone else thinks you’re very clean, very put together, but I know that you’re always just making it up as you go along.” Even the Paul from the other timeline couldn't have known what they could build together. He might have hoped, but he couldn't know. John shuffles his leg up Paul’s calf and smirks. “’Sides, I’ve always known what I wanted, and how to get it. I’m feeling rather betrayed you’ve given me so little credit in this, Macca.”</p>
<p>A smile pools in Paul’s face. “You’re right. You’ve always been better at my tripping, haven’t you?”</p>
<p>“Certainly made better use of it than you ever did,” John sniffs, relishing Paul’s chuckle.</p>
<p>“God, I let you teach me anal <em>twice </em>because I was so besotted I kept your secret.” Paul’s expression is so open, his eyes gleaming with unmetered affection and slight mischief.</p>
<p>John can’t fathom a world where he doesn’t fall head over heels for this daft man. “I think even without the tripping, we would have ended up together, somehow.”</p>
<p>“Maybe a little slower,” Paul admits with a laugh.</p>
<p>“I’d always love you some way,” John says, and he says the word ‘love’ less these days to savor the meaning of it.</p>
<p>Paul sighs at the sound even as a little twist of sadness mars his face. “It would have just been shorter then,” Paul says, revealing ache he conceals so neatly about John’s brush with death and John’s mouth opens.</p>
<p>“No.” The word falls with the purity of intention of ‘yes’ and Paul stares at him, wonder veiling his face.</p>
<p>“No?” Paul echoes, breathless. John leans forward, brushing their noses.</p>
<p>“Little thing like death wouldn’t stop my love.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>John stirs in the hospital bed, grasping the threads of a passing dream. He remembers being young at Blackpool, his parents shouting at each other, at him.</p>
<p>He remembers running out of the building, toddling with tears on his face—</p>
<p>
  <em>Warm arms scooping him, a hand petting his hair, a gentle voice. “It’s all right. Shhh, beautiful boy. Let’s find your aunty…”</em>
</p>
<p>John opens his eyes, glancing about the stark walls and then alighting on a warm face.</p>
<p>Where John goes, Paul still follows, and Paul sits neatly in the chair beside him. He’s wearing the same striped shirt John’s seen in his nightmares for years, and he knows today is the day. The kids and grandkids have already filtered in and John might cry for the blessings in his life but he’s still impressed with his own stinginess with the song-rights. They’ll all be pleasantly surprised by the will if they don’t mind how much he’s donating.</p>
<p>It’s just him and Paul now, and he struggles to further awareness.</p>
<p>“You never told me about Blackpool,” John complains, voice a rasping grate of air. His hand fidgets and there’s a scrabbling sound as Paul perches his glasses over his nose. Vision clear, he can see the sweet, sad smile on Paul’s face and the way he understands exactly what John means.</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to remind you. It's not the best memory. I was just as happy to step into your mess for our first introduction, it proved more predictive of our relationship.” It boggles John that even this ancient he still has such melody and tenor to his voice. Maddening, it is, but John won’t hold it against him.</p>
<p>“<em>Flaming Pie </em>does make a better album title than <em>Blackpool Row</em>,” John quips. Paul chuckles, old nattered hand coming up to tangle with John’s. “You don’t have to, at all, you know,” John says. “We’ve the grandkids, more knickers for you to wet, albums to make.”</p>
<p>Paul burbles a laugh, wetness taking his eyes. “How is it we’re still arguing about this? I’ve already done it, haven’t I?”</p>
<p>“I’m just saying, you have one ticket anywhere. Why not go back, ravish me in me leathers instead?” John tempts. “I have a thing for older men, you know, younger too. You’ve always been both. We could rewrite the world again and again, keep starting over."</p>
<p>“No, John,” Paul says, face a daft soft thing that still cradles so cleanly in John’s hand when he reaches to wipe the tears. Paul cries harder, manages a smile. “I’d rather… I’d rather all of this than any other timeline. I said before the world would be a drag without you. I’m ready.”</p>
<p>“Still soft. Could pretend to think about it,” John says, his hand shaking and faltering to his lap. His heart feels thready and he gasps, “Paul? Can you…”</p>
<p>Paul, knowing, carefully moves John to the side and manages his way in bed, arms coming round the aged slant of John’s shoulders to cradle a body that aches with growing cold. “I’m here, Johnny… Nothing makes me happier than to spend today together in bed.”</p>
<p>John chokes a laugh, turns his face into the wet of Paul’s so he can feel the smile, his gratitude. He breathes into Paul’s skin, whispers something just between them…</p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are two men in the room.</p>
<p>Then—</p>
<p>They’re gone.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>+</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>“The time has come</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>the walrus said</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>for you and me to stay in bed again</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>it’ll be</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>just like starting over…”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>— John Lennon, “Just Like Starting Over,” August 1980 draft.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>.<br/>Thank you for reading! 💜<br/>You can listen to John's August 1980 draft of "Just Like Starting Over" <a href="https://mclennonwasreal.tumblr.com/post/165091803029/this-is-a-version-of-just-like-starting-over-in">HERE</a>. He mentions the Walrus and influenced the end of this fic. </p>
<p>I made a SERIES so if you're looking for missing moments, the children's reactions, what Mary McCartney used her trip for, etc., please subscribe!</p>
<p>This is more than the 20,000 I wrote at the start. I thought it was done baking but alas... I really enjoyed writing this, and I hope you enjoyed reading it! </p>
<p>Comment if you want to! °˖✧◝(^▿^)◜✧˖°</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Six years ago when I got into the fandom, I heard the story of the flaming pie and immediately thought of the time-traveler's wife scenario. Luckily, I hadn't the chutzpah to pull it off then because it would have gone poorly. I have the chutzpah now, so let's see...</p><p>  <a href="https://fingersfallingupwards.tumblr.com/">TUMBLR</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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